Comments & Notes

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're going to look at comments in Excel, but
• 00:08 you'll notice this module's actually called Comments & Notes.
• 00:11 And the reason is is because if we go and
• 00:14 take a look at the Review tab on my ribbon.
• 00:16 Depending on whether you're running Office 365 or
• 00:20 Excel 2019 you're gonna see a different thing happening here.
• 00:24 This is the Office 365 view.
• 00:26 In Office 365 you'll notice that I have notes.
• 00:28 You won't see those in Excel 2019 but you will see comments.
• 00:31 Except that the version that I'm showing for
• 00:34 notes, this is what were called comments back in Excel 2019.
• 00:38 So things are changing in this area, and
• 00:40 I think it's important that you should see this.
• 00:42 So if we go and we actually pick off a new note,
• 00:46 which is a legacy comment, and I say New, it pops up this little yellow box here.
• 00:51 And it's got a little red indicator in the cell.
• 00:53 So right now I could leave myself a comment or
• 00:58 a note to say Price checked 2018-12-31.
• 01:04 And that leaves me with a nice little note here that I can resize and put out here.
• 01:11 No problem, and when I click away it disappears.
• 01:13 When I mouse over it, it will come back,
• 01:15 if I select the cell it pops up, until I mouse away.
• 01:18 So I have to mouse over the cell to actually see this.
• 01:21 I could leave myself another note, or legacy comment here as well.
• 01:24 For this one I could say Engineers
• 01:28 provided this in November 2018.
• 01:33 There we go.
• 01:34 And again if I click outside I can now mouse over each of the individual cells to
• 01:39 show them, but I can also show all the notes.
• 01:43 In this point they kind of relapse, I might wanna grab one maybe and
• 01:46 move it around here a little bit.
• 01:48 So we just left-click and drag to get them to this area.
• 01:51 Now whether or not they're showing or not I can actually hide all of them.
• 01:56 And then I can go through and say, let's go and show me the next note.
• 02:01 And it says I've reached the end of the workbook, would I like to start again?
• 02:04 We'll say OK.
• 02:04 And it will now allow me to cycle through each of the notes in the workbook,
• 02:09 or pull all of the notes up so that I can see them all at once.
• 02:14 So if that's a note now, what's a comment?
• 02:18 Well, let's take a look.
• 02:20 I'm going to grab this last cell here and I'm gonna choose to go to New Comment, so
• 02:24 again, you're gonna need Office 365 for this.
• 02:26 And notice it pulls up a slightly different piece here.
• 02:29 What I'm going to do in here is I'm going to type @ken and what you'll
• 02:32 notice now is it's gonna search through and it actually comes up with my name.
• 02:36 I'm logged in right now as the GoSkills demo account on my tenant.
• 02:39 But this one comes back and says, hey, there's ken@excelguru.ca.
• 02:44 And if I hit tab, I can say, Ken, can we reduce this at all?
• 02:51 And now, when I go and actually click on this little Post button.
• 02:55 It creates me a comment here that actually @-mentions and
• 02:59 tags someone in the document.
• 03:00 And you'll notice, it shows a slightly different indicator.
• 03:03 Now, I'm gonna move this around, I'm gonna say Show Comments, and
• 03:07 it'll actually pop it into a pane on the right-hand side.
• 03:09 So I can see all of the comments that are actually here.
• 03:12 And the good thing about this is that when I actually send this @-mention,
• 03:16 what's happened is that is it's actually emailed Ken Puls.
• 03:19 To say, hey somebody commented on you or to you in a document,
• 03:22 you should probably check it out.
• 03:24 And at that point, what can happen is the user can click on the link and
• 03:27 go directly into the work book to actually address it.
• 03:30 And look at that, it looks like Ken's actually joined the workbook and
• 03:33 is able to actually come back and say, could he address this particular comment.
• 03:37 So what's gonna happen now is you'll notice that he actually does,
• 03:40 he comes back and says, look, you know what?
• 03:42 If you made a change to this, and
• 03:44 Ken provides us with an answer to say if we reduce the sidewalk width by 25%,
• 03:48 we could actually cut the number of the square meters required.
• 03:52 So let's do exactly that, 360 and we can go and say, Thanks!
• 04:01 And call it a day.
• 04:03 This is what we call a threaded comment.
• 04:04 This is the new style of comments.
• 04:07 Now the question that we also may have with this, is how can we go and
• 04:09 print these things out and look at them and see what we actually have?
• 04:13 Well if you go to your Page Layout tab, and
• 04:15 you go into the options here by clicking on the little dialogue launcher.
• 04:19 You'll notice on the sheet that we have the ability here to display comments at
• 04:23 the end of the sheet.
• 04:24 So what'll happen is if we go into our print preview at this point in time,
• 04:28 you'll see that you'll have a full page that shows us the print preview of
• 04:33 the actual document we're looking at.
• 04:35 But it also shows at the end of the worksheet all of our comments.
• 04:42 So that's kind of cool, but is there something that we could do differently?
• 04:45 And the answer to that is yes there is.
• 04:48 If we go back and
• 04:49 we look at this dialogue launcher again and we go back to Sheet, you'll
• 04:53 notice that legacy comments can actually be shown As displayed on the sheet.
• 04:58 And when we print preview that, things look a little bit different.
• 05:03 Notice that our two notes or legacy comments are showing up nicely here.
• 05:07 But unfortunately this ends up taking us to the piece that's spilling
• 05:11 over on the text, but there is no third page.
• 05:14 So unfortunately in this case, the two yellow comments that we created
• 05:17 do show up, but our new threaded comments here do not.
• 05:22 The key thing here that you're gonna have to remember is these new style of comments
• 05:26 are in Office 365,
• 05:28 until then you're still gonna be working with the classic legacy notes.
• 05:31 In addition, in order to get the mentioning feature,
• 05:34 the document needs to be stored in SharePoint or
• 05:36 OneDrive in order to be able to actually link back to your Active Directory.

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