Insert Messages in Excel – 5 Ways!

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Ever wonder if there’s more than one way to leave a message in Excel??? Whether to help you remember something or alert a coworker about something important, there are several ways you can insert messages in Excel…including a covert method!

5 Ways to Insert Messages in Excel

1.      Insert a Comment (or “Note” for Office 365 users)

The most common way to leave a message in Excel is by inserting a Comment (or a Note, if you’re using Office 365).

*For the purpose of this article, I’ll be calling these Comments. If you’re using Office 365, please just know that, for you, they’re a Note*

Comments are attached to a cell and are, most commonly, used to leave notes related to the contents of the cells they’re attached to.

They can be hidden or displayed. If hidden, they can still be flagged by the small, red triangle on the top left corner of the cell that contains the comment.

There are 3 ways to insert a Comment in Excel:

1. Use the Shift+F2 keyboard shortcut
2. Right-click and select New Comment or
3. Go to your Review tab, in the Comments section, select New Comment

2.      Office 365 Users: Start a Conversation by Inserting a Comment

If you’re using Office 365, Comments are a different feature for you. In Office 365, Comments allow you to have digital conversations with other users in your network.

WATCH: our tutorial comparing Comments and Notes in Excel 365

To insert a Comment in Excel Office 365:

1. Right-click and select New Comment or
2. Go to your Review tab, in the Comments section, select New Comment

NOTE: To insert a “traditional comment,” make sure to select New Note

You can even tag a user by starting your Comment with “@username”!

This will send the tagged user a notification with a link to the Comment in which you tagged them in.

Important to Know: for the tagging feature to work correctly, both you and the tagged user need to be using Office 365 and the file with the conversation needs to saved to either SharePoint or OneDrive for Business.

Upgrade to Office 365

3.      Communicate Instructions with Custom Data Validation Error Messages

The Data Validation feature in Excel lets you set criteria for what data can be entered in your chosen cells.

For example, if you want users to enter a state abbreviation in certain cells, you may want to limit the number of characters entered to only 2.

Then, when someone tries type in these cells, Excel will review and validate the data to see if it fits within the criteria for those cells.

If the data does not fit the Data Validation criteria, an error message will display.

By creating a custom Data Validation Error Message you will be much more helpful to your users than by defaulting to the generic message.

See how you can customize your Data Validation Error messages.

4.      Use IFERROR to Turn Formula Errors into Helpful Messages

You can control how formula errors look in Excel by applying the IFERROR function to your formulas.

One of the IF functions, IFERROR can be used to customize what will display on your spreadsheet, should the calculation result in an error.

It would look something like this:

=IFERROR((calculation),”custom message”)

Learn more about the IFERROR function

5.      Covertly Hide a Message in Your Spreadsheet using the N function

If you want to hide a message for yourself (or someone else!) in Excel, you’ll want to use the N function.

The actual purpose of the N function is to convert a value to a number. It doesn’t get used much since Excel does this automatically. However, it can come in handy when you want to hide a note in your spreadsheet.

Here’s how:

After your formula or hard-coded number, type +N(“type your message”)

Important to Know:

• Always use quotation marks. Even if the content of your N function is numerical. This way, you avoid the N function altering any formula results.
• The content preceding the N function should be numerical. This won’t work if you have other text in the cell.

It would look something like this:

=SUM(A1:A10)+N(“type your message”)

How to Find Your Hidden N Function Note

You may be wondering how to go about finding the hidden notes you created using the N function.

• To find your hidden message, you can use the
  Find feature by pressing Ctrl+F from your keyboard and searching for the
  contents of your message

Or

• You can display all formulas in your
  spreadsheet, including any hidden notes, by using the Ctrl+` keyboard
  shortcut to display all formulas. Make sure to press Ctrl+` a second
  time, to display the results again.

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FYI, this was created using the desktop version of Excel in Microsoft 365.

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