Comments & Notes

Quick reference

• 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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