How to add comments to an Excel Worksheet cell
Posted on April 6, 2008 at 5:34 am
Make sure to read other posts from the Excel Tips series!
I’m a big user of Excel and it always amazes me how few people add comments to their Excel spreadsheets! Adding and using comments in Excel is a great way to explain formulas, cells, and other data in the spreadsheet itself, thus saving you the time spent on the phone with colleagues! It’s really easy to add comments to cells in Excel and I’ll explain how you can do so in Excel XP/2003 and Excel 2007.
Comments are basically notes that can be inserted into any cell in Excel. It’s useful for reminders, notes for others, and for cross-referencing other workbooks.
How to add comments to a cell in Excel 2007
The first thing you’ll want to do is click on the cell where you want to insert the comment. In Excel 2007, you can add comments to a worksheet by going to the Review tab in the ribbon bar.
In the Comments group, click on New Comment. In the Excel spreadsheet a comment text box will appear where you can type in your new comment.
Type in your comment and click outside of the text box when you are done. You’ll notice that there is a small red arrow at the top right of the cell, indicating that this cell has a comment. Clicking on the cell automatically brings up the comment.
How to add comments to a worksheet in Excel XP/2003
In Excel 2003 and XP, you have a couple of more options for inserting comments into a cell since there is no ribbon bar. You can use the menus at the top, the mouse context-menu or the reviewing toolbar.
Add Comments Using Menu Bar
First, you need to click on the cell that you want to insert the comment into. Then click on the Insert menu option and choose Comment.
Just like in 2007, a text box will appear next to the cell where you can enter your comment. Also, a red triangle appears at the upper right hand corner of the cell.
Add Comments Using Mouse Context Menu
Another simple, yet nifty way to insert a comment into an Excel cell is to simply right-click on the cell and choose Insert Comment. This actually works in both Excel 2007 and Excel 2003.
Add Comments Using Reviewing Toolbar
Finally, you can use the Reviewing toolbar in Excel to add comments to cells. To open the Reviewing toolbar, go to View, Toolbars, and choose Reviewing.
The first icon on the far left is the New Comment button. Click on it and a new comment box will appear in the currently selected cell.
That’s it! You can also check out other options on the Reviewing toolbar to display/hide comment, delete comments, print comments and more. Have a question about comments, post a comment! Enjoy!
[tags]add comments to excel, working with comments, add comment to cell, add comment to worksheet, add comment to workbook, insert comments in cell[/tags]
» Filed Under MS Office Tips
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sorry this blog is in english :S
I want to print a sheet but not some cels
how can I hide them?
Hi Dav, if you want to hide cells in Excel, select the cell range and then right click and choose Format Cells. Click on the Protection tab and then check off the Hidden box. Now those cells will be hidden.
You can also hide entire columns and rows by right clicking on the column headers (A,B,C,etc) and choosing Hide. Hope that helps!
Anyone know if you can remove the registered user’s name from the comment box? My computer is registered to Darth Vader, so every time I “insert comment” the default starts out as “Darth Vader:” Each time I have to select that text and delete it before adding my comment. It’s a pain, so any way to not have the user’s name inserted as a default would be quite helpful.
Jonathan
Have a workbook with several worksheets. Have one worksheet with many comments, some deliberately hidden & some showing. Want to have a copy of the worksheet in the same file with none of the comments showing. How do I do this without effecting the comment formatting of the original worksheet?
Thanks for the tips on how to add comments on an Excel worksheet!
Hello! simply super resource
How can I add a picture into a comment in Excel?
Add a picture into a comment in Excel 2003 is easy -
See http://www.mrexcel.com/tip089.shtml
Excel 2007 is another story. Any help here would be appreciated.
Is there a way to have the comment box pop-up only when you type a cetain range in the cell. For example if you are using a score card and you want comment from 8 thru 0. How do you have the coment box pop-up only when the user type those ranges in?
So then you have all these comments, and you can print them as a list, but there seems to be no way (in 2007) to get a list of the comments to display outside of printing them (e.g., to show in another sheet like you can with the track changes).
Anyone know how to display a list of the comments without printing them (some solution not involving Visual Basic)?
I’m setting up several comment boxes and have a macro to automatically bring up the comments. However, I’m doing this in several cells and it’s become inconvenient to click on a different cell everytime I want to go to a new cell after typing in a comment box. Is there a way to get out of the comment box without using the mouse and/or clicking on another cell so I can go to another cell?
Great post! Thanks! Need to add comments to my Excel spreadsheet..
There’s a better alternative to comments – http://www.xlnotes.com offers add-in that can create text notes for selected cell which can contain pictures and formatted text just like Word document. Notes can also store web-pages and attached files. Hope you find this useful.
Why when I hit enter in the Insert Comment box, it changes my name back to ‘Author’,?
Is there a way to quickly print out all the comments for an Excel sheet with the cell numbers? Kind of like how you can print slide notes in Powerpoint? This would make life much easier…
Thanks for the step by step instructions for adding comments to Excel cells, it has helped a lot. Is there a way to add a picture or icon to a comment? Something other than text?
How do i insert a picture into a cell or a comment window in excel 2007?
Very timely article, thank you very much! Had to add some comments to my Excel file and figured this is better than attaching a separate Word document!
I’ve got a question that you might know. How do I add a “comment” to an item of a drop-down list? I’ve got several items and every item has its own comment. I dont know how to do this. Can someone help?
Thanks
Is it possible to add the same comment to a selected range of cells? Thanks in advance!
A comment in Excel is always in bold-style. How to change this standard setting for comments. I want to start with a blank comment, also no ‘:’ to start with. When I empty the field in the personal settings (no name or anything) my comment starts with my login-ID. I want a blank! Please tell me how to do this.
Having imported a file into Excel 2007 I want to reshape the comment boxes to match those already present but I can’t find a way of doing this. I’m stuck with boring rectangles instead of the shapes that were accessible in 2003. Anyone know how to do this in 2007?
Hello there,
Im trying to hide cells that contain clipart pictures, I can hide the cells however the clipart pictures wont hide with the cells. Is there a way to embed the pictures into the cell so they get hidden to?
Thanks in advance