Force Some Notes to ALWAYS Be Visible to Provide a Help System
November 03, 2023 - by Bill Jelen
Problem: I’m sending out a worksheet to managers and division vice presidents in order to get their budget for next year. I need to include specific instructions for many of the cells in the worksheet.
Strategy: There are two primary techniques you can do this: cell notes and color-coding.
To use cell notes, for each note you want to display 100% of the time, select the cell and choose Review, Show/Hide Note. Alternatively, right-click the cell and choose Show Note. This will force those notes to be always visible.
To use color coding, you can make all notes meant for managers green, and you can make the vice presidents’ instructions blue. When managers and vice presidents open the file, they will have an easy-to-follow visual road map through their budget worksheet.
Additional Details: By default, notes will not be printed. You can choose either of two settings to control the printing of notes by following these steps:
1. From the Page Layout tab, choose the dialog launcher icon in the lower-right corner of the Page Setup group.
2. In the Page Setup dialog, go to the Sheet tab and use the Notes dropdown to control the printing of notes.
If you select As Displayed on Sheet from the Notes dropdown, the note boxes will print in the size and format you have set up for all the displayed notes. This setting will not print notes that are hidden with only the red triangle visible. To make effective use of this setting, you would have to make a few notes visible, as described in this topic.
If you select At End of Sheet from the Notes dropdown, the notes will print in a separate section at the end of the printout. The only drawback to this method is that the note printout indicates that a certain note is attached to cell A50. Unless you print row and column headings, there is no way for the reader of the printed document to know which value on the sheet is located in cell A50.
This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel
Title photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash
