Whether you're creating an Excel workbook for yourself or collaborating on a spreadsheet with others, comments are useful for many reasons. You should master the ways to manage them when you start your Excel training.
Consider these four uses:
Today we are going to cover some of the basics of working with comments in Excel.
To add a comment to a cell, click the cell you want to attach the comment to. Then do one of the following:
In the comment box, below the name, type the comment text.
Click again in the cell, or in any other cell, when you have finished entering the text. The comment is hidden but the comment indicator remains.
While working with comments in Excel 2016 I ran into what appears to be a bug. Usually when you create a new comment, the comment name is pulled from the Username under Customize your copy of Microsoft Office About the Excel General Options screen.
I created a new comment and added text to it. the Username (my name) is displayed at the top of the comment. After a few minutes, the name in the comment automatically changed to “Author” without me doing anything else to the comment.
I thought Excel might have been trying to pull the Author Document Properties value (File> Information screen, then Properties> Advanced Properties> Summary tab), so I entered my name in that field. But that didn't work either. He still replaced my name with “Author”.
I haven't been able to find a solution to this problem. If you figure out how to fix it, please let us know in the comments below!
To show or hide the comment in a cell, click the cell that contains a comment indicator and do one of the following:
To show all comments on all worksheets in a workbook, click Show All Comments in the Comments section on the review tongue. Click Show all comments Again to hide all comments in the notebook.
The Show all comments The option displays all comments in all worksheets in all open workbooks and in any workbooks you create or open while the option is on. You can't display all comments for a single worksheet in a workbook. The only way to do this is to display each comment in the worksheet individually.
You may find that some of your comments may overlap. See the next section, “Moving or resizing a comment” to find out how to fix that.
If some of your comments are blocking other comments or cells, you can move them.
To move a comment, the comment must be displayed without hovering over the cell. So show the comment using the method in the “Show or hide comments” section above.
Move the mouse cursor over the edge of the comment box until the cursor changes to a plus sign with arrows. Then click to select the comment box. You'll see size handles appear on the sides and corners of the box.
Keeping the mouse cursor over the edge of the comment box, click and drag the comment box to another location.
In our example, cell C3 is now not hidden by the comment in cell B2.
You can resize a comment by moving the mouse cursor over any of the sizing handles until it turns into a double-sided arrow. Then drag the handle to resize the comment.
Editing a comment after creating it is easy. To edit a comment, click the cell that contains the comment you want to edit and do one of the following:
If the selected cell does not have a comment, the Edit Comment button is the New Comment button instead.
Add, change or delete text in the comment. When you're done making changes, click the cell again, or any other cell.
To remove a comment from a cell, select the cell and do one of the following:
There is no confirmation dialog when deleting a comment.
By default, text in comments uses Tahoma font in size nine. You can't change the default font and font size, but you can format text you've entered in a comment.
To format a comment, make the comment editable as described in the “Editing a Comment” section above. Then highlight the text you want to format. Right click on the selected text and select Comment Format .
About the Comment format In the dialog box, make the changes you want to apply a different format to the text. For example, we are making some text bold and red using the Font Style box and the Color the dropdown list.
Your new formatting is displayed in the comment when you hover over the cell to show it or when the comment is displayed as described in the “Show or hide comments” section above.
You can also use the formatting tools in the Home tab to format the selected text in a comment. But you can't change font color or fill color using Home tongue. You must use the Comment format Dialog box to change font and fill colors.
If you want to add the same comment to multiple cells, you can add the comment to one cell, then copy and paste it to other cells. But there is a special way to do this.
Click in the cell that contains the comment you want to copy and press Ctrl + C . Then right-click in the cell where you want to add the copied comment and select Paste Special .
About the Paste special dialog box, click Comments in the Paste section and then click OK .
Only the comment is pasted. The cell content remains unchanged.
If you have a lot of comments, the comment indicators (little red triangles) in the cells can be distracting, especially if you're presenting the worksheet to someone.
You can easily remove comment indicators from all cells. Go to File> Options . Click Advanced on the left side of the Excel Options dialog box.
On the right side of the Excel Options dialog, scroll down to the Monitor section. Below For cells with comments, show. , select No comments or flags. . When this option is selected, hovering over a cell with a comment will not display the comment.
While both comments and flags are hidden, you cannot use the Show / Hide Comment Option to display the comment for individual cells. Instead, use the Show all comments option in the Comments review section tab to show all comments. This also shows all comment indicators again.
The Show all comments The option is connected to the For cells with comments, show. option. So turn on Show all comments change the For cells with comments, show. option to Comments and flags .
You may not see comment indicators right away. For me, switching to another program and back into Excel seemed to cause the indicators to show up. This may be another error.
When you turn off the Show all comments As an option, Excel reverts to the default action of showing only comment indicators and showing comments when you hover over cells. The For cells with comments, show. the option changes to Indicators only, and comments on hover .
To review all the comments in a spreadsheet, you can hover over each cell one at a time, but this can be time consuming if you have a lot of comments.
A faster way is to go through each comment using Next and Previous buttons in the Comments section on the review tongue. Comments are displayed one by one each time you click. Next or Previous .
It's better to review your comments in your spreadsheet digitally, instead of printing 5 Reasons Not to Print Excel Spreadsheets and Better Alternatives 5 Reasons Not to Print Excel Spreadsheets and Better Alternatives Still printing spreadsheets? Here are five reasons why you should be working digitally. Read More But if you really prefer to review your feedback on paper, you can print your feedback worksheet.
To print your worksheet with comments, click the tab at the bottom Working with worksheet tabs in Excel Working with worksheet Tabs in Excel The worksheets in your Excel workbook they are displayed as tabs at the bottom of the Excel window. We'll show you how to work better with Excel spreadsheet tabs. Read More
Show all comments, or just the comments you want to print, using the methods described in the “Show or hide comments” section above. Then, move or resize comments as needed using the methods in the “Move or resize a comment” section above.
In the Configure page section on the Page Layout tab, click the Page Setup dialog launcher.
About the Configure page dialog box, click the Sheet tongue. Then select one of the following options from the Comments the dropdown list:
Click Print when you're ready to print your worksheet How to Print Only an Area in Microsoft Excel How to Print Only an Area in Microsoft Excel Why include unnecessary rows and columns and make printing more unwieldy than it already is? Read more with the comments..
The Printing screen in the File shows the tab. You'll see a preview of what your worksheet will look like with the printed comments. Select your printer and click Print .
When collaborating on documents 3 Microsoft Office Online Teamwork and Collaboration Tools That Impress 3 Microsoft Office Online Teamwork and Collaboration Tools That Impress With Office 2016 and its free online counterpart, Office Online, Microsoft has rolled out new tools for teams to collaborate remotely and real. hour. We show you what you cannot miss. Read More Use Excel comments to make the document review process easier and faster for everyone involved.
