Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Adding Pop-Up Documentation to a Cell.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 20, 2019)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Want a neat trick you can use to make your worksheets more helpful to users? How about adding a pop-up window that displays documentation whenever the cell is selected? To add such a feature, follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Input Message tab of the Data Validation dialog box.
There are, obviously, other ways you can use the Data Validation feature of Excel to check and limit the data that is entered in a cell. However, if you follow the steps above, all data is still accepted, and Excel displays a helpful message whenever the cell is selected.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3361) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Adding Pop-Up Documentation to a Cell.
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Want to control what users put into a cell? It's easy to do using a feature called data validation, as described in this tip.
Discover MoreData Validation is a great way to limit what a user can enter into a worksheet cell. It may not stop a cell from being ...
Discover MoreData validation is a great tool for limiting what can be input into a cell. Excel allows you to specify what should ...
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2020-08-28 11:24:02
Chad C.
Question for you Allen. Is there any possible way I could make it so that anytime I hover over a cell it would show a date? I guess more importantly would there be a way to do this without manually going through and entering the date manually into each cell's comments field?
I'd like to do this because in my spreadsheet I have a 'Week of' row for each week of the year. Then columns for Mon, Tues, Weds, etc., in which I enter the hours that employee worked that day. But I'd love if I could hover over the cell for a moment, even if the hours have been entered, to quickly make sure I'm actually entering it on the correct date.
Thank you!
-Chad
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here:
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