There may come a time when you're collaborating on a project and you want
a friend or coworker to make some changes to your worksheet.
In this example, I'm creating a schedule for a company retreat and I want some of my
teammates to fill in some of the blanks and possibly even make some corrections.
There are two features in Excel but I'll make this a lot easier:
track changes and comments. You can access both of the Review tab.
First, click the Track Changes command,
choose Highlight Changes
Next, check the box where it says "Track changes while editing." This will turn
this feature on.
You can also limit what types of changes are highlighted but I want to highlight
them all, so I'm going to leave these things the way they are.
Make sure the box next to "Highlight changes on screen" is checked, then thing go
ahead and click OK.
If Excel wants to save your workbook, just click the button to save an continue.
And now we're ready to start making some changes!
Let's say I'm a coworker, and I want to add some information to the schedule.
When I do that, this cell gets a little triangle in the corner and also a new border.
If you or anyone else mouse over the cell, you can see exactly what was
changed and also who made the change.
This makes it easy to keep track of multiple edits.
Let's skip ahead a little bit.
This worksheet now has a lot of different track changes. So many, in fact, that I think
it'd be easier to read if they were listed on a separate worksheet.
To do this, you'll need to save your workbook first
Then click the Track Changes command and choose Highlight Changes.
Next, check the option that says "List the changes on a new sheet" then click OK.
And a new worksheet will appear with a list of all the changes in the workbook.
We can now easily review the edits and also see which sells there are in.
So, right now the changes we've made are sort of temporary, meaning that
they aren't officially part of the workbook yet. To make them permanent, we need to accept
or reject them, depending on which changes we want to keep.
First, go to Track changes, then choose Accept or reject from the menu,
and a little dialogue box will appear. I want to look at all of the changes that
hadn't been reviewed yet, so I'm going to leave this first option checked.
You can also narrow it down to who made the changes, or to a specific range of cells.
When you're ready, click OK.
You'll be able to review each change and then accept or reject them one by one.
In this case, I know I want to keep all the changes in the workbook, so I'm
going to go ahead and choose Accept All.
OK! Now these changes are permanent; however this markup won't go away until
we turn track changes off. Let's get back to that in a minute...
Another useful feature for collaborating on workbooks is the comments feature.
For example, say I want to leave a note or question about this item without actually
changing what's in the cell.
We can do that by selecting the cell,
then clicking the New Comment command.
Now just type your comment here
and click anywhere outside the box when you're done.
Comments will show up as a little triangle in the top right corner of a cell.
Just mouse over the cell, and you can easily read the comment.
If you want to view all of the comments at once, there's a way to do that:
Just click the command says Show All Comments.
You can use that same command to hide them again.
You can even edit the comments in your workbook o update something you said or
maybe reply to someone else. Just select the cell you want, then go ahead and click
Edit Comment.
You know, I think I'm finished with
so I'm going to delete all the comments by selecting each one and then clicking
the Delete command.
I'm also going turn off track changes which will finally removed the markup
that you can still see here.
All you have to do is go to the Track Changes command, the Highlight Changes
and now uncheck the box that says "Track changes while editing."
Now once you do this, all the track changes in your workbook will be accepted automaticallym
so make sure you're ready for that before you continue.
Click OK,
then click Yes to confirm,
and now you're all set!
All of these features can be a big help when it comes to collaborating on workbooks.
They make it easy to keep track of revisions and communicate ideas back and forth,
so you can work work on the same file with anyone you want.