Adding comments and shapes

- You can add comments to a worksheet cell. Sometimes you might be doing it to inform people as to how a formula might look, or you might want to express a question about data, that sort of thing. If you're familiar with the concept you already have recognized it on this particular worksheet. We see red triangles at various locations. I'm going to slide over I11 right here, and we see a pop-up. I am the creator of the message, you see my name there. "See Jennifer for more details "on these unusual formulas." So, that may be helpful, may be not.

You're looking in the formula bar, doubleclicking - it is a bit unusual, maybe you'll call Jennifer. We can put this in a variety of locations, and we can even change the look of them. That's not a typical look there, that green background. More typical look is the one found here in cell I23, I'll slide over this. That could be a comment, it could be sort of an open question as to whether it works or not. We can take a look at that one, too, possibly. The idea is it could be informative, it could be raising a question. I'm also going to slide over E5, and that looks quite a bit different. And that points out the idea that we can use different shapes here.

Possibly, bubbles coming out there, sort of like a thought balloon. We can use a variety of different tools. First of all, the basic idea is if we simply want to add a comment, say for example, the cell right here. Maybe we're not sure whether that's accurate or not. Shift F2 is certainly one way to do that - we can add a comment. And you'll see your name right next to it there, or whoever owns this particular computer or this installation of Excel, selected there, of course. And I don't really want to type anything here, I'll just put in some text - all done. Click outside of it.

Any time I slide over it it's there. I've got three or four in the worksheet now. If you go to the Review tab we can show all comments, they are all visible in different locations. And when we do this, they don't always appear next to the data. That's a little bit disconcerting, but we see them all here. That's a possibility, showing them all. One by one we could hide this one or that one. I'm going to right-click cell C4 and hide the comment. So we can do that certainly. I can unclick that option Show All Comments up on the Review tab - now they're all gone.

I could right-click any one of them and Show/Hide; right-click another one - Show/Hide. So we have this ability to show some or all and hide some or all as needed, and pretty easily set up, too. So, once again, we could go back to the Review tab, Show All Comments, or turn it off. Now, if you'd like to change the shape of it. Let's take one of the comments as a more standard look, right here. Now, we don't actually make the change here by right-clicking. Now if we want to change the color we do have to make this present, this Show/Hide Comments.

That one is visible. We can right-click its border and go to Format Comment. That is what we are not seeing, is a new tab up on the ribbon unlike certain kinds of other pictures and objects in Excel. We do have some color choices here, maybe I'll make this bright blue, bright red - whatever. Different colors, that way. Bright yellow, there you are. Easily changed. Change in the shape is a little bit trickier, at least at first, unless you know where to find it. This shape here was done earlier, but it was done using a technique that certainly is not obvious.

What we need to do is to right-click anywhere in the Quick Access Toolbar way at the top of the screen. Now, possibly you're showing this below the menu; if it's there you want to right-click on it. It makes no difference where the location is but right-click somewhere within the Quick Access Toolbar and customize Quick Access Toolbar. Under the heading "Choose comments from" click the drop arrow and in this list here eventually, scrolling down, you will see Drawing Tools, and one of the choices in here is Change Shape.

Click that, Add, and you're adding this to the Quick Access Toolbar. You could later take it out, or if you find yourself using it frequently, simply leave it there. Change Shape - click Ok. So, here's the box here, we want to change the shape of it. It's selected right now, we've got that button available in the Quick Access Toolbar. Click it, there're some choices, and you can see a variety of different options here. Quite a few, in fact. Callouts are here: stars and banners. How about this one? Now, we'll have to reshape it probably to get the text in there.

So you can imagine it's kind of fun. Perhaps, maybe that's not the right word to use with business applications, but I think you get the idea. In this case you might make it quite bigger. If we select there, we can also go to the Home tab and change the font size, a little bit smaller maybe, sort of thing. So you can imagine playing with that. Let's by right-clicking on the cell that has the comment hide the comment. As we slide over it we see it this way. Slide away - we don't. If we go to the Review tab, Show All Comments, we see it there, too.

So, it gives us a little bit of flare sometimes as we're working with these comments. When it comes time to printing these, by the way, it's not always quite what you would expect. If we press Control F2 - that's our quick way to get a print preview - we're probably not going to see these. Now, it's not because they're off to the right necessarily; we could actually change the page setup here, or even within the list right here change this from Portrait to Landscape. We're still not going to see those. So, if we go to Page Setup, we do have an option on the Sheet tab here: Comments, At end of sheet.

That will put them on a separate sheet. So as I click Ok here, we're looking at Page 1 - bottom of the screen says Page 1 of 2. Using the mouse we will scroll down. We could show the comments this way, but that's certainly isn't the way that they're appearing on the sheet. But that's certainly is one option. If we go back to Page Setup, just to the lower left here, we could consider the other option on the Sheet tab: As displayed on sheet. Click Ok. We might not be seeing them all, we might have to do a little bit of range, but it looks like these are all coming through okay. Now, if there're overlapping data, like the one up here is that may or maybe not be appropriate, but you'll just have to go back by pressing Escape or the left arrow on the upper-left corner here.

Consider moving this around, so that it isn't hiding as much data. Also consider making it smaller, that sort of thing. So you have to experiment with that a little bit, too. But you can't see them. Now, there's another way to add comments, but they're not called "comments". So I'm going to click the button for Show All Comments to hide all these for the moment. Let's suppose I want to clarify how people should enter data here. I also want to do this down here for the second half of the year. So using the Control key I'll highlight both of these here. I'm now going to the feature called Data Validation: Data tab - Validation.

And I'm not going to actually change what's allowed here, I'm goint to allow any value, but I'm going to provide an input message. And so under Input Message I might explain one way or another how to type these entries with a single decimal, or if it ends in zero just type 340, for example, instead of 340.0 and so on. And maybe we'll put in a word for a title here, like Reminder, or we could put in Warning or Caution, something like that, double quote maybe. Click Ok. So we're not really putting in any rule, but we're just reminding people how the data should be entered, and that means every time we click one of these cells here.

So, in a certain sense this is not a comment, officially it's not a comment, but it is and it does serve the same purpose of, you know, alerting people as to something unusual about this, or just a quick reminder as to how the data should appear. And you could imagine maybe the message being a little bit more concise but how that could be used. And actually we didn't really put in a rule that has anything to do with the range of the data; that's where data validation is more commonly used. So, different techniques here using comments and lastly data validation to in effect put a comment into a cell.