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About this lesson

Learn about creating, reviewing and printing Excel comments, as well as how comments are evolving in Office 365.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Comments.xlsx
20.9 KB Comments - Completed.xlsx
22.3 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
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  • 00:00 In this video we're going to look at comments.
  • 00:07 And comments are essentially a little posted note that you can attach to a cell
  • 00:11 to give you a little bit more information than you might normally have.
  • 00:15 So we can right-click on a cell to create one and go to Insert Comment.
  • 00:19 And it'll pop up with a box with your user name in it.
  • 00:22 And now we can enter a comment,
  • 00:25 such as Per Quik Mart 2015-06-30, for example.
  • 00:32 Now, you'll notice that, this one, the text is spilling, so I can resize my
  • 00:36 comment by left-clicking and dragging, getting this to where I need it to be.
  • 00:40 There we go.
  • 00:41 When I click outside, it disappears.
  • 00:44 When I mouseover the cell, it comes back.
  • 00:46 If I click the cell, it still disappears when I move away.
  • 00:50 Now we can create other comments as well.
  • 00:52 So, we could grab this one here and say insert comment and
  • 00:57 maybe this one is per engineer, there we go.
  • 01:00 And that's great and you can see them when you mouse over them but
  • 01:04 maybe you actually want to see these all at one time.
  • 01:08 In order to do that, we actually go to the review tab and what we can do is we
  • 01:13 can click, Show All Comments, and this will actually put them out there.
  • 01:17 Now the nice thing is we can move these around a little bit and
  • 01:21 get them out of the way so we can sort of see what is going on.
  • 01:24 The challenge at this point becomes, well what if we want to make them go away?
  • 01:28 Well then we just click the Show All Comments button.
  • 01:31 Or maybe we can click on this one cell and show and
  • 01:33 hide the specific comment while not dealing with the other ones.
  • 01:36 We have a few different display options.
  • 01:38 We can also cycle through each comment in the workbook
  • 01:41 by actually going to the next button.
  • 01:44 If we click next, it'll move us into the comment, the first comment.
  • 01:47 Next will move us to the next one and
  • 01:49 as you can see, the practice solution already has some comments in it as well.
  • 01:54 And we can cycle through each comment in the workbook using these particular
  • 01:59 commands.
  • 01:59 And it'll cycle and tell us when we got to the end,
  • 02:02 at which point we can go back to where we were.
  • 02:05 These are really good for something that you don't necessarily want to print.
  • 02:09 If you just it in the workbook to see what is there, you can always come back and
  • 02:13 pick those up later by just mousing over them.
  • 02:16 If you want them to print that becomes a little more of a challenge.
  • 02:19 So here's what ends up happening here.
  • 02:20 I'm gonna show all comments.
  • 02:23 In order to control the printing options we actually go to page layout,
  • 02:26 and we go into the print titles button.
  • 02:30 And you'll notice in here that we have a comments option on the right hand side and
  • 02:35 you can see right now that comments displayed is none.
  • 02:38 And if I go and quickly throw into print preview here,
  • 02:41 you'll notice that indeed there's no comment showing anywhere.
  • 02:45 So, what we do to fix this is we go to Print Titles and
  • 02:49 we say, how would we like our comments to be shown?
  • 02:52 If I'd like to see them as displayed on the sheet,
  • 02:55 I can click on this, and then I can say, let's print preview.
  • 03:00 And you'll notice that those two comments will now print with their
  • 03:03 arrows and everything.
  • 03:04 So that's kinda handy.
  • 03:06 If I don't want them there, I also have another option to say,
  • 03:11 print them at the end of the sheet.
  • 03:13 Actually we'll jump straight into print preview here.
  • 03:17 And this does womething slightly different.
  • 03:18 There's no comments here, but
  • 03:20 you'll notice that we actually have a second page.
  • 03:22 And when we get to the second page, it lists all of the comments.
  • 03:26 Now, it's a little bit challenging to see this, but what it actually gives me is
  • 03:29 the cell reference and what the body of the comment actually is.
  • 03:35 For this reason, using this particular format of comments as displayed on sheet
  • 03:40 is really not all that useful unless you also go and
  • 03:45 turn on the gridlines and the row and column headings.
  • 03:49 Because telling me that it's in cell B4,
  • 03:52 when I don't know where cell B4 is, is really not useful.
  • 03:56 When we flag these two guys in conjunction with comments at end of sheet, and
  • 04:00 we go to print preview now, you'll actually have the grid reference.
  • 04:04 So when you see that there's a comment for cell B4, you can actually locate column
  • 04:09 B and row 4 to be able to say, where does that specific comment actually point to.
  • 04:14 So, I'd highly recommend if you're going to use the,
  • 04:18 at end of sheet, that you actually set it up in that manner.

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