Comments and Notes

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video,
• 00:05 we're going to talk about documentation in the form of comments and notes.
• 00:09 Now, one thing I do want to be clear on, though, if you've been using Excel for
• 00:13 a while and you're used to the comment feature that existed in Excel 2019 and
• 00:17 earlier.
• 00:18 You should know that as of Excel 2021 and in Office 365,
• 00:22 comments have been renamed as notes and a new comments feature was introduced.
• 00:28 So I'm going to refer to these by their current terminology just so
• 00:31 you're aware before we get into things.
• 00:34 Now, if we actually go and take a look at our cell B6, just to the left of me here,
• 00:39 you'll notice that it has a little red indicator showing right at the top.
• 00:43 This indicates that there is a note on that cell.
• 00:46 And if I mouse over it, that note is going to pop up, and
• 00:49 it tells me that this price was last checked a whole heck of a long time ago.
• 00:53 So the first thing I'm going to show you is how we can actually edit a note that
• 00:57 exists in a document.
• 00:59 So if I go and click on the cell and go right click, I can come down to Edit Note.
• 01:04 And this will allow me to go in here so that I can then come in and say, look,
• 01:07 you know what?
• 01:08 This one was actually updated the last time in 2021.
• 01:11 In order to complete my editing, I just click outside into a cell.
• 01:16 I can go back and mouse over it and make sure that, yes, it's absolutely there.
• 01:20 What if I want to add a new note?
• 01:23 Well, I can right click on a cell, and I can choose New Note.
• 01:27 It will pop up the same yellow box,
• 01:29 has got my name preformatted in there based on what my Office username is.
• 01:33 I can delete that if I want to, or
• 01:35 I can just type in a new comment on this one here.
• 01:38 And there we go, this one was last updated in 2018 as well.
• 01:40 So we've got a little mixture of data that's going on in this area.
• 01:44 Now, this gives me two notes in my document.
• 01:48 How do I actually see what this note content is a little bit easier?
• 01:53 Well, if you go to the Review tab, you'll find a Notes section here.
• 01:57 You have the option here to create a new note.
• 02:00 You can also go through and start cycling through your notes.
• 02:02 Now, this is interesting because I hit Next Note and immediately tells me that,
• 02:06 hey, you're at the end of the workbook,
• 02:08 probably because I was editing the most recent one.
• 02:10 But I'm going to say, OK, and then it will drop me back into the first note.
• 02:14 I can then go and say, Next Note, and it will move through these.
• 02:18 Or I can show all the notes on the workbook in order to actually pop them up
• 02:23 so I can see them.
• 02:24 And these will actually print if you want to do that.
• 02:28 And you can actually see if we go into the Page Layout and
• 02:31 we go into something like Print Titles, for example.
• 02:34 There is the option here to print my comments and
• 02:36 note just as displayed on sheet.
• 02:38 This is for notes only, but if I go to the Print Preview, you'll notice that these
• 02:42 will actually print exactly as they're displayed on the worksheet.
• 02:45 So that's kind of cool.
• 02:47 Now, I'm going to make these go away because that's pretty noisy
• 02:50 on this one here.
• 02:51 So let me just go and and get rid of this.
• 02:53 But I should also just make the mention here before we get into comments
• 02:57 that you can actually convert all of your notes to comments as well,
• 03:00 although I'm not going to do that at this point.
• 03:02 So what's the difference between a note and a comment?
• 03:05 Well, this is a comment.
• 03:09 A comment is a much richer interface that we actually have here,
• 03:11 where you can actually have conversations back and forth.
• 03:14 And you can see here that when this workbook was originally written,
• 03:18 the GoSkills demo account and I had a conversation back and forth to
• 03:22 figure out whether or not we could actually change this particular cell.
• 03:25 So let's look at how we actually build one of these up.
• 03:28 I would go to another cell, right click, and choose New Comment.
• 03:34 And in this place, I have the ability to go in and
• 03:37 start saying something like This is a total.
• 03:40 Now, one of the most confusing things about comments is if I leave the cell,
• 03:45 the indicator is still there.
• 03:46 But this has not been posted, so
• 03:48 it won't be saved to the workbook at this point in time.
• 03:51 I have to press Ctrl+Enter to post it, or click this little thing right here.
• 03:56 Before I do that, though, I want to add something else to it.
• 04:00 I want to add in an @mention.
• 04:02 And what the @mention does, it actually looks through your Office 365 ecosystem to
• 04:07 see who is part of that organization.
• 04:09 And when I actually go and commit this and put someone's name in here, for example,
• 04:14 if we go and chose Deanna.
• 04:16 At this point in time, what would happen is if I post that,
• 04:18 Deanna will get an email notification to let her know that she has been tagged in
• 04:22 a comment in the document.
• 04:23 And this is the cell, she'll be able to go right there.
• 04:26 Now, the requirements of this is that the data does need to live in SharePoint or
• 04:30 in Office 365 and be part of your ecosystem.
• 04:33 The names that will come up are part of that ecosystem as well, okay?
• 04:37 At this point in time, what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to cancel
• 04:40 this one because I don't really need to see that one there.
• 04:42 What about reviewing and printing these?
• 04:45 Well, right on the Review tab,
• 04:46 you can see we have the ability to create a new comment.
• 04:48 We can cycle through these things.
• 04:49 We can actually show the comments.
• 04:51 Notice that the comments actually show in the Comments pane on the right hand side,
• 04:56 and they do get compressed down if they're really long.
• 04:59 So that's something to be aware of, you can also edit your comments and
• 05:03 things like that as well.
• 05:04 The final thing I want to show you here, if I go to the Page Layout tab is about
• 05:09 printing, because so far, the As displayed on sheets only works for notes.
• 05:14 But we can also choose to show everything at end of sheet.
• 05:17 And what happens now is when we do a print preview,
• 05:20 our first page will come up without any real indicators going on.
• 05:24 But when we move to the next page, you can see that it actually lists the cell,
• 05:29 whether it was a note or a comment and
• 05:31 what the conversation actually was that took place there.
• 05:34 So you can actually have all of this show up as a bunch of basically separate
• 05:38 footnotes to your document to explain what's going on in those areas.

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