Comments

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Comments' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adding a Comment to Multiple Cells
Adding a comment to a single cell is easy. What if you want to add the same comment to multiple cells, however? Here are some ideas on how you can accomplish this task.

Anchoring Comment Boxes in Desired Locations
Want your comment boxes to appear someplace other than the right side of a cell? You may be out of luck, and here's why.

Changing the Comment Color
Normally Excel displays comments in a color reminiscent of sticky notes you keep around your office. If you want them to use a different color, here's how to make the change.

Comments Don't Appear when Cell is Pointed To
By default, comments associated with a particular cell should appear on-screen when you move the mouse pointer over that cell. If they don't, then there may be a setting amiss or a more esoteric problem.

Copying Comments to Cells
Need to copy whatever is in a comment into a cell on your worksheet? If you have lots of comments, manually doing this can be tedious. Here is a macro solution that will make quick work of the copying.

Copying Comments when Filtering
The advanced filtering feature in Excel allows you to quickly copy unique information from one data list to another. If you want to copy the comments associated with that information, you are out of luck; advanced filtering won't do it. There are workarounds you can use to get the same result, however.

Counting Comments in a Worksheet
Need to know how many comments are in a worksheet? You can figure out the count manually, or you can apply the handy macro presented in this tip.

Editing a Comment Close to Its Cell
Have you ever tried to edit your comments, only to find that Excel displays them some distance from the cell to which they are attached? This happens more often than you might think. This tip explores some of the possible causes and provides some ideas on how you can fix the problem.

Editing Comments
Comments can be very helpful in a worksheet. After they are added, you may want to change what they contain. Here's how to make the edits you want.

Filtering for Comments
Excel makes it easy to filter a data table based on various values in that table. It isn't so easy to filter according to whether a cell contains comments or not. Here's a few ways you can make the filtering easier.

Finding and Replacing Text in Comments
Excel allows you to add comments to individual cells in your workbook. Unfortunately, Excel doesn't provide a way to search and replace text in those comments. You can do it with a macro, however.

Formatting Text in Comment Boxes
If you add comments to a worksheet, you might want to format the text contained in those comments. Excel doesn't provide a lot of formatting capability for comment text, but the techniques discussed in this tip can help accomplish your designs.

Linking Comments to Multiple Cells
In Excel, single comments are associated with single cells. If you want to have a comment be linked to multiple cells, you'll need to use the workaround discussed here.

Managing Comments
If you frequently add comments to cells in a worksheet, Excel provides a variety of tools you can use to manage those comments. This tip provides an overview of the tools provided.

Pasting a Comment into Your Worksheet
Excel allows you to not only put information into cells, but into comments attached to those cells. Here's how to copy the information from a comment into a cell, using techniques you are already familiar with.

Placing Formula Answers in a Comment
Excel won't allow you to directly or automatically insert the results of a formula into a cell's comment. You can, however, use a macro to place that result exactly where you want it.

Printing Comments
Comments can be a boon when you want to annotate your worksheets. If you want, you can instruct Excel to print the comments right along with the worksheet itself. Here's how to instruct Excel to include them.

Static Sizes for Comment Boxes
Comment boxes can be resized as you like, but those sizes may not "stick" in Excel. This tip explains when they should stick and when they won't.

Viewing Comments
There are three different ways that Excel allows you to display any comments that are in your worksheet. Here's how you can change the display method used.