Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Managing Comments.

Managing Comments

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated October 7, 2020)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016


Besides simply adding and viewing comments one at a time, Excel includes some tools that allow you to easily manage your comments. The tools used to manage comments are found on the Review tab of the ribbon. If you have quite a few comments in your worksheet, these tools can be a great help.

The buttons on the Review tab of the ribbon make it very easy to work with the comments. For instance, you can add a comment to a cell by clicking your mouse on the New Comment tool.

Perhaps the most helpful tools are the Previous Comment and Next Comment tools. These allow you to work strictly with comments and jump from one to the other. As you click your mouse on one of these tools, Excel highlights a comment. The New Comment tool changes to Edit Comment, and you can use the Hide Comment tool to dismiss the comment and the Delete Comment tool to permanently remove it.

When you are done working with comments, just click somewhere else in your document and change to a different ribbon tab as necessary.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11912) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Managing Comments.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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