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About this lesson
Learn about creating, reviewing, and printing Excel comments.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Comments and Notes - Begin.xlsx37.6 KB Comments and Notes - Complete.xlsx
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Quick reference
Comments and notes
Creating, reviewing, and printing Excel Comments and Notes.
When to use
Comments and notes are tools 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
Background
- In Excel 2019 and earlier only one kind of Comment exists
- In Excel 2021 and higher (including Office 365):
- Comments have been renamed to Notes
- An updated Comments feature has been introduced
- In this document:
- The new Comments are referred to as Comments
- Legacy comments (present in Excel 2019) are referred to as Notes
Creating Comments & Notes
- Right-click a cell and choose “Create Comment” or “Create Note”
- Mouse over the cell comment or note will pop up, leave the area and it will go away
Reviewing Comments & Notes
- To review Comments or Notes, go to the Review tab
- Options for reviewing Notes include showing all notes on the sheet at once, or cycling through by clicking Next Note or Previous Next
- Options for reviewing Comments include showing the comments pane, or cycling through by clicking Next Comment or Previous Comment
- Notes may be moved around on the worksheet
Using @mentions in Comments
- In order to use the @mention feature you will need all of the following:
- The document must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or Sharepoint
- You must be using Office 365 or a version of Office higher than 2019
- 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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