Excel comments and notes?
QI’ve recently subscribed to Microsoft 365. I did this to replace my Office 2010 apps, which I understand are no longer supported. Mostly, I use Excel, for tracking household bills and so forth. Sometimes I attach comments to certain cells, as a reminder for something or other. I don’t have a problem, as such, as I can still do that in Excel 365. However, I noticed that they look a bit different from before. Also, when right-clicking to attach a new comment, I see an option called New Note. I tried this and the text box that appeared looked like my comments used to. So what’s going on here? What’s the difference between comments and notes? Kevin Ward
AThis is because Microsoft has made a change to bring Excel in line with other Office apps, though it’s a bit confusing. Traditionally, adding a comment in Excel would result in a box that looks a little like a sticky Post-it Note. By contrast, in Word, adding a comment has for years created a place where an onging conversation can take place between different people who might need to work on the document.
Microsoft stuck with that arrangement for decades, but doing so presented obvious inconsistency between the Office apps. So, with Excel 2019, Microsoft renamed comments to notes, so that comments could become, well, comments! In other words, creating a comment in Excel now allows you to have discussions with other people, as you might in a Word document. If you want comments that look how Excel’s comments used to look and work, you’ll need to create notes. Cells containing new-style comments are marked with a purple tag, while notes (old-style comments) are flagged with a red marker.
Now, Excel 365 does inform users of this change but only on the Review tab of the ribbon, and only the first time you visit it (see screenshot). So, it’s easy to miss that. If comments/notes are created via the right-click menu, as you do, then you wouldn’t see it at all – so you’d have no reason to know this.
Want to know the difference between technical terms? Email noproblem@ computeractive.co.uk