Placing a Picture in a Comment

In Word, Leticia notes that you can paste a picture into a comment. She's tried to do this in Excel, but without success. She wonders if there is a way to paste a picture into an Excel comment.

There is no way to paste a picture into a comment (as you do in Word), but there is a way to make a picture appear within a comment. This may sound like a confusing contradiction, but Excel allows you to actually format the comment, independent of the text contained in the comment, so that it is "filled" with a picture.

Note that Microsoft changed the way comments work in Excel in Office 365. Comments are now threaded allowing users to have discussions with each other regarding the data. Notes work like comments in earlier versions of Excel. The following steps apply both to earlier versions of Excel using comments and to Excel for Office 365 using notes:

1. If the comment or note is not normally visible, right-click the cell and choose Edit Comment or Edit Note from the resulting Context menu.
2. Right-click on the comment or note border. (Make sure you are actually right-clicking the border, not the contents of the cell itself. You can tell if you will be right-clicking the border because the mouse pointer will look like a four-headed arrow when you are hovering over the border.)
3. Choose Format Comment from the Context menu. Excel displays the Format Comment dialog box.
4. Make sure the Colors and Lines tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Colors and Lines tab of the Format Comment dialog box.

5. Click the Color drop-down list and choose the Fill Effects option. Excel displays the Fill Effects dialog box.
6. Make sure the Picture tab is displayed. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. The Picture tab of the Fill Effects dialog box.

7. Click the Select Picture button. Excel displays the Select Picture dialog box, which looks very similar to a standard Open dialog box.
8. Use the controls in the dialog box to locate the picture you want in the comment or note.
9. Select the picture and click the Insert button.
10. Click OK to close the Fill Effects dialog box.
11. Click OK to close the Format Comment dialog box.
12. Click a cell elsewhere in the worksheet to exit editing mode for the comment.

Remember that these steps don't actually insert a picture in the comment or note, but instead use the picture as the fill color for the comment or note. This means that you can still add any text in the comment or note you want and it will overlay the picture you just inserted. You can, if desired, also delete any text in the comment or note so that it appears the only thing in the comment or note is the picture.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13280) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.