Excel comments not displaying

Anonymous
2017-01-22T11:53:30+00:00

I have excel 2016, and the comments have been working fine.  Just recently it does not display comments when I mouse over them. The show/hide command in the review tab is greyed out.  I never had this problem before, and never had to see if the comment show/hide feature was active or not.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-10-27T21:29:03+00:00

    Same with me.  Now rollover on comments is working. 👍😊

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-10-26T20:24:08+00:00

    Since the last software update the roll over feature now works as intended.

    I'm now using Version 16.18 (181014).

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-10-05T03:46:39+00:00

    Hey Sam,

    Thanks so much for this but, on another thread I was told changing to Insider Fast was a better option than reverting to a previous version as there were risks etc etc.

    I am not an excel whizz so am not really confident enough to give this a go as this is a shared file with our directors.  Also, even if I revert to the prior version, unless all the directors in our company also do the same, they will still be unable to see the comments, is that right?

    Thanks

    Faye -

    I find that Insider Fast releases are full of bugs that are in fact worse than the problem you are trying to solve.  

    When multiple people need to share an Excel file with lots of comments (our Delivery Schedule has thousands of comments), then I recommend all users be on a previous "stable" version of Excel, and that you test new releases of Excel on only one computer before allowing everyone to upgrade.

    You also should keep backups of the data files most important to your business so that if corruption does happen you only lose recent changes.  In our company all computers have OneDrive storage for cloud backup, and in addition all users run a Carbon Copy Cloner full disk backup weekly (only changed files are copied so it's fast).

    The install process I describe in the above thread worked fine for me, but if you are doing Carbon Copy Cloner backups then you should do one prior to deleting Excel and installing a previous version - just on general principle.  At the same time this isn't like an OS update so you can always just re-install Office 365 at any time and you would get the lates apps.

    Good luck!

    Sam

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-10-05T01:31:30+00:00

    My excel file has had all the comments wiped out completely which is causing me untold grief at work!

    I already noted this on another thread which informed me to update to Insider Fast and that would resolve the problem, it hasn't and now apparently my worksheet has no comments and but now has some "Notes" which are two comments I have added since this problem started.

    Why on earth would you waste time changing the name of comments to notes and messing around with a function that has worked fine for years?

    How will I get all the comments back from the original file? It also removed the freezed panes, the filters, changed the colour of highlighted cells and completely re-sized the columns so they are way smaller than the text within them.

    I can't re-boot an old version of the file as it gets updated multiple times each day.

    As mentioned before I am on a Mac using High Sierra (not Mojave!), using latest version of excel (16.19), i open the file online through 365 and then click edit in excel, the comments dont show in either format

    Thanks for help!

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-03-22T14:28:18+00:00

    Some more information on the behavior of this problem.  As I said I'm running Excel 2016 on a Mac.  

    Today I opened the Excel App but didn't open any file.  Then I just let is stay open for a while.  After 30 min I opened a file.  The "display comments on rollover" function didn't work anywhere in the spreadsheet.  

    By Quitting Excel and reopening on the same file I could see the comments.  After 10 min or so the functionality stopped working.

    Excel Team -- When will you get this repaired?  We use Excel to track a detailed delivery schedule for our services firm and there are comments everywhere, and they are constantly being updated.  It is very inconvenient to always have to Quit and restart the app.  Your prompt attention to this is appreciated.

    I use a Mac, and MS Office 2016 - and I have same problems. Initially, it worked well, and then it stopped.

    Each time to view the comment, you have to edit the comments, and then the dialog box doesn't close automatically.

    I updated with the latest.

    Tried using customer chat service, and that person tried to help, but when he had remote access, I tried on a new excel sheet, and it worked.

    But the problem is I have sensitive information on my old excel sheet and that doesn't work.

    What MS Office is trying to do, I have no idea.

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