Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Learn about creating, reviewing and printing Excel comments, as well as how comments are evolving in Office 365.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Comments.xlsx9.8 KB Comments - Completed.xlsx
11.3 KB Comments - Extra Practice.xlsx
19.8 KB
Quick reference
Topic
Creating, reviewing and printing Excel comments.
When to use
Comments are one method that we can use to help document the source data or business logic that is contained in our files. They fade into the background when not needed, but can pop up when we do need to reference them.
Instructions
Creating Comments
- Right click cell B3 and click “Create Comment”
- Enter “DRG Definitions can be reviewed online” and click in any cell to exit the comment
- Mouse over B3 and the comment will pop up, leave the area and it will go away
- Create 2 more comments:
- C3: “Provider ID can be found in the source data”
- D3: “Total medical payments made by customers”
- Right click any cell with a comment in it and choose Edit Comment to edit its text
Reviewing Comments
- Go to the Review tab and click “Show All Comments”
- Drag them to move them around on the worksheet
- Click Show All Comments again to hide them all
- On the data tab click “Next” to cycle through the comments one at a time
Printing Comments as Displayed
- Go to the Review tab and click “Show All Comments”
- Go to the Page Layout tab and click “Print Titles”
- Change the Comments dropdown to “As displayed on sheet” and click Print Preview
- Notice that the comments will print as shown on screen
Printing Comments at End of Sheet
- Go to the Page Layout tab and click “Print Titles”
- Change the Comments dropdown to “At end of sheet”
- Select the Gridlines and Row and column headings checkboxes, then click Print Preview
- Notice that comments are printed on a new page with references to the cells
- 00:03 It's no secret that sometimes when we build complicated Excel files that we can have things
- 00:08 in there that we might forget how they worked or why they worked a little bit later.
- 00:12 So one of the things we can use to help combat that problem is comments.
- 00:16 Now comments are kind of like little post it notes in Excel.
- 00:20 We can make one on a cell, we can add a little note to it and then it
- 00:23 goes away when we don't need it and it comes back when we do. So it's not really in
- 00:27 our face when we are doing our regular business work inside Excel but it's there when we need it.
- 00:32 Some places where we might use them are say in the header here. If we click on DRG Definition
- 00:36 you can right click and say Insert Comment and this is where a little post it note pops up and we
- 00:42 put in something that we might find useful. Say DRG Definitions
- 00:48 can be reviewed
- 00:51 online and maybe we'd put a website URL in there as well that would actually take us to where we needed to go. The nice thing about
- 00:58 comments is when we click in a cell somewhere else, they disappear and it's all we can see is a little red indicator.
- 01:06 Yet when we mouse over that cell the comment pops up.
- 01:10 If we want to edit it we right click on the cell and choose edit comment and we can actually get in there to change it.
- 01:17 Add a period. Do whatever we want.
- 01:20 Let's add a couple more. So we've got the Provider ID here
- 01:24 and say insert comments.
- 01:27 How about Provider ID can be found in the source data.
- 01:34 Now the source data sheet isn't in this file but it might be a helpful note in the context of the greater solution that was being developed.
- 01:43 And total payments let's put a little note on here that gives a little bit more information.
- 01:48 Total payments
- 01:51 actually let's go with total medical payments
- 01:55 made by customers.
- 01:59 So now we have some notes and as you can see we can actually roll over them and each one will pop up or go away. We can also use these
- 02:06 to explain the business logic on an individual cell it doesn't have to just be headers.
- 02:10 So how do we actually work with these things? Well if we go to our review tab
- 02:15 we actually have a few different methods here. We can show all the comments on the sheet by clicking this button
- 02:20 and they will all popup. Except they overlap so that's not really helpful.
- 02:25 If we turn that off we can also go in Next and it will show us that we're at the end of the
- 02:29 workbook right now. If you say OK you'll start over at the beginning
- 02:33 and we can cycle through each comment until we come to the end and we get that message again.
- 02:39 We can also arrange our comments on the screen where we like them. So if we show all comments right now
- 02:45 we can move this one here out of the way a little bit. Lets put it down here.
- 02:51 And we can move this guy just drag and drop him out of the way as well. So we actually have the ability to move these around and get them
- 02:57 to a place where it can actually help us read and understand our data a little bit better.
- 03:02 Now the next thing we want to do is we want to know how to print our comments.
- 03:06 By default they won't print at all. We'll print it out and they'll just disappear, they'll go basically back to looking like this. But if we want to
- 03:14 actually see them on the sheet we'll show all our comments. If we go to Page Layout
- 03:19 and I go to Print Titles
- 03:22 you'll see that we come directly into the Sheet tab and we have comments in the bottom right hand corner over here.
- 03:27 It's currently set to None. Let's go with As displayed on sheet.
- 03:32 And go look at our print preview.
- 03:35 And you can see that the comments will print just fine on there. Now that's great but what if we don't
- 03:40 really want them obscuring the data? Maybe we've got a much bigger list. Is there other options?
- 03:45 Yeah there is absolutely. We can go back to our Print Titles
- 03:51 and we can change from As displayed on sheet to At end of sheet.
- 03:57 Now this is going to be a little bit hard to see but when we go into print preview what ends up happening is
- 04:03 that, the comments don't show here but we now have two pages. And if we click over the next page
- 04:08 what we have here is it'll read cell B3, comment Ken Puls DRG Definitions can be reviewed online.
- 04:15 So each of the individual cell comments is printed with the cell reference to where it is and the name
- 04:21 that actually built the comment as well as what it is.
- 04:25 The only problem that we have there is that with those cell references there's nothing on our worksheet that actually tells us where those cell
- 04:32 references belong. So in order to make use of this particular technique
- 04:37 it's really important when we're actually setting up to print our comments at end of sheet
- 04:42 that we also turn on the row and column headings and the grid lines.
- 04:46 Because when we do that then we actually have a reference point that we can see that cell
- 04:52 B3 refers to this cell when we're looking at this extra page of comments we can now track them back to where they belong.
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