Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Learn about creating, reviewing and printing Excel comments.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Comments.xlsx19.8 KB Comments - Completed.xlsx
21.8 KB
Quick reference
Topic
Comments.
Description
Creating, reviewing and printing Excel comments.
Where/when to use the technique
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 B4 and click “Create Comment”
- Enter “Price per Master Landscaping 2015-09-02” 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:
- B5: “Per Mister Engineer”
- B6: “Per Legal Survey”
- 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 as
- 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
- 00:04 In this video, we are going to look at comments,
- 00:07 ways you can leave yourself some hint as to what's been going on in your workbook,
- 00:12 so you can come back and look at it later, you can figure out what you're doing.
- 00:15 So in a case here,
- 00:16 you'll notice that we have a little schedule that somebody has built up and
- 00:19 it's got a little cost per meter of gravel, considering a 1 centimeter depth,
- 00:24 how many centimeters of depth is required and how many square meters are required.
- 00:27 When you multiply all those things through,
- 00:29 we come up to our budget of 28,800.
- 00:32 Now one of the things that might be really important if you're building a model and
- 00:35 you're coming back to it later on,
- 00:37 is you wanna know where did these numbers actually come from?
- 00:39 So to deal with that, we can right-click on our cell, and we can say,
- 00:43 Insert Comment.
- 00:45 You'll notice that it comes up with a very small level of text but
- 00:48 we can resize these and make them a little bit bigger, and if we click in the bottom,
- 00:52 it will let us actually leave a comment.
- 00:54 We can say price per master landscaping,
- 00:58 let's say 2015 dash 09 dash 02, so
- 01:03 we know exactly when it happened.
- 01:08 Now, what's nice here is when you click out, the comment disappears, although it
- 01:13 leaves a little red indicator in the cell, when you mouse over it, that pops up.
- 01:17 So we could come in here as well, and we could say, let's insert a comment here and
- 01:22 say that the depth that we need is per
- 01:28 Mister Engineer and
- 01:33 our last one could be Insert per legal survey.
- 01:39 So, there we go we got three comments that make up the individual piece and
- 01:43 they all disappear but when we mouse over them,
- 01:45 we can actually see what's happening in each place.
- 01:49 But what if we wanna review all the comments at once?
- 01:52 We can actually do that if there's a bunch of comments in a worksheet or
- 01:55 a workbook, we can go to Review, we can say, Show All Comments.
- 01:59 You'll see it'll actually show all of the individual comments.
- 02:03 Unfortunately, these are sort of lying on top of each other, so
- 02:05 we could move them around a little bit and say, let's put this one down here.
- 02:09 Now we've got some subtle little arrows that are pointed to where the cells are.
- 02:13 When we click Show All Comments, you can see that they pop up and
- 02:16 they stay up, which is kind of nice.
- 02:19 We can also hide it and we can say let's go to Next and it will actually
- 02:23 reach through the individual comments that are in the workbook and you can
- 02:26 see that we've actually got some on one of the other worksheets in here, as well.
- 02:31 Now, If we go next here,
- 02:33 it'll cycle through from the next cell in that particular area.
- 02:37 We can hide the comments, as well.
- 02:41 The next thing that you may want to know here is how would you
- 02:44 actually print these.
- 02:45 What if I actually wanted to print off this worksheet and
- 02:47 show these particular comments on that printout?
- 02:50 We can do that, as well.
- 02:51 What we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to the File and we're gonna go to
- 02:57 Print and this will give us a print preview, as you can see here.
- 03:03 Now this isn't really gonna be good enough for
- 03:05 us though because we can't see the comments in this particular area.
- 03:08 So why don't we make some changes here.
- 03:10 We'll go and say Cancel that for a second.
- 03:12 We're gonna go to Page Layout and
- 03:14 on the Page Layout tab, let's go to the Print Titles button.
- 03:18 In here, you'll find that we have the option to print comments.
- 03:22 We can change this to say At the End of the Sheet, or As Displayed on Sheet.
- 03:26 So let's say As Displayed, say OK, and let's go back into that File, Print, and
- 03:31 take a look preview now.
- 03:33 You'll notice that the comments are showing up in here, now that's kinda cool
- 03:36 and they've got little arrows that point to the cell, so that's kinda cool.
- 03:39 They will actually print that way.
- 03:41 There's another alternative though, when you actually go in to print comments, and
- 03:44 that is that you can actually print them at the end of the sheet.
- 03:48 If you do this, it's really important to make sure you show the grid lines
- 03:53 on your printout as well as the row and column headings.
- 03:56 The reason for this is because when you actually go to print your worksheet,
- 04:00 what will happen when you've chosen to show your comments at
- 04:04 the end of the worksheet is that it will actually print them on a new page.
- 04:08 With a little reference on it that says, here's the cell reference.
- 04:11 So in this case B4, price per masterlandscaping.
- 04:14 If you don't have your row and column heading showing and
- 04:16 potentially grid lines on to make it easier to find them,
- 04:19 you won't be able to tell which cell they belong to.
- 04:21 Now unfortunately,
- 04:22 I wish I could show you that in here but at the time I recorded this,
- 04:25 there's actually a bug inside Excel where this particular feature is not working.
- 04:29 Printing your comments As Displayed where they show up, you obviously saw but
- 04:32 the other one is gonna need a patch before it happens.
- 04:35 The good news is that Microsoft is patching Excel 2016 regularly, so
- 04:39 hopefully, it will be resolved by the time you are watching this video.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.