There may be some times when you're collaborating on a project,
and you might have a coworker or a friend make changes to your workbook.
For example, here, I'm working on a schedule for a
company retreat,
and I'll need a couple of my coworkers to fill in some of the blanks
and possibly make corrections.
I'm going to use two features that will really make this a lot easier:
Track Changes and Comments.
And these are both found on the Review tab.
First, go to Track Changes, and click Highlight Changes.
Put a checkmark where it says "Track changes while
editing."
And here you can customize which changes are highlighted,
but I want to highlight all of them, so I'll just leave these as they are.
Make sure "Highlight changes on screen" is checked, and click OK.
And Excel needs to Save the workbook now, so just
click OK to save it.
And I'll pretend that I'm a coworker who's making
changes to this workbook.
I see a couple of items in the schedule that need
to be changed,
and when I do that, the cells will get this
little triangle in the corner and also a border.
And if somebody else makes changes, then they'll show up as a different color.
When you hover over the cell, you'll be able to
see exactly what was changed,
and also who made the change.
This workbook now has several different tracked changes,
and I think it would be easier to read them if they were listed on a separate sheet.
To do this, you'll first need to save your workbook.
And then go to Track Changes and click Highlight Changes.
And check List changes on a new sheet.
Now when you first turn on Track Changes, you
might not be able to select this,
so if that happens you'll need to click OK
and come back to this window, and then you should be able to select it.
And it will create a new sheet called History.
Now I can just glance over all of the different changes that were made,
and I can also see which cells they're in.
Right now, the changes that we've made are sort of
temporary,
and we'll need to either Accept the changes to make them permanent, or Reject
them.
So go to Track Changes and Accept/Reject Changes.
I want to look at all of the changes that have not
been reviewed, so I'll just leave this checked.
You could also narrow it down by reviewer or to a
specific range of cells.
And then click OK.
You'll be able to review each change, and you can
choose to Accept or Reject it,
but I know I want to keep all of these changes, so I'll Accept
All.
Another great reviewing feature that you can use
is Comments.
Let's say I want to make a suggestion or ask a
question, without actually changing the cell.
I'll just add a comment to the cell by first clicking on it and then selecting New Comment.
And comments will show up as a little triangle in
the top-right corner of the cell.
You'll be able to read them when you hover the
mouse over the cell.
But I'd like to view all of them at once, so I'll
click Show All Comments.
You can edit a comment by clicking here.
I'm just going add a sentence to clarify this question.
I'm finished with this schedule now, so I'll delete all of the comments
by selecting each one and clicking the Delete command.
And I'll also turn off Track Changes.
Just go back to Highlight Changes.
And then uncheck this box.
Once you do this, any tracked changes that you
haven't reviewed
will automatically be accepted, so just make sure that you really want to
do this.
And then click Yes.
Track Changes and Comments are great features to
use when you're collaborating on a project.
And you don't necessarily have to be on a company
network to take advantage of these features.
You can still collaborate over email, or you could
even just
have all of the collaborators edit the workbook on the same computer.