Tip of the week # 500
25 November 2016


How to delete all comments in a workbook (Microsoft Excel) *

Today's tip is a special one ... it's number 500! I started writing tips as far back as 2003 and at that time I had no idea it would continue for so long or prove so popular. I get regular feedback from readers, who say that they always keep the tips, or even post them on their office noticeboards. Over the years the tips have also been picked up by a number of business publications and websites, such as the Cambridge News and the Cambridge Network and even by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. And as I'm still passionate about helping you to make the most of your software I will continue to collect new tips, either through my own training work or through ideas and suggestions from my course participants. So here's one that was inspired by last week's group at Acushnet Europe Limited. (Thanks, guys!) How to quickly delete all comments in a workbook.

As you know, creating a workbook is sometimes a team effort, involving several colleagues. One person may be responsible for setting up the basic workbook. He or she may then submit that workbook to another colleague, whose job it is to review it and make suggested changes. This is often done by entering a comment, rather than making an actual change. A comment can be a suggestion for a change, a question to the person who created the workbook or any other text that relates to a part of the worksheet. OK, so you might know how to create and review comments. You might even know how to delete them. But what if you want to delete all of them in one go?

Here's how:

  1. Display one of the worksheets containing the comments.
  2. Click the Select All button. (The empty rectangle in the upper-left corner of a worksheet where the row and column headings meet, i.e. to the left of column A and above row 1.)
  3. If you have more than one worksheet containing Comments and want to remove them all in one go, right-click the sheet you used in step 2 and select Select All Sheets from the drop-down list.
  4. On the Review tab, click on the Delete button in the Comments group.
  5. Make sure you select a single sheet before you continue to work, because anything you do while all sheets are grouped (as indicated in the title bar) will affect all sheets.

Finally, you might want to check out two old tips about comments:

How to quickly insert a comment in multiple cells : tip_392.php
Print a worksheet with comments showing : tip_142.html


* Unless stated otherwise, these tips were written for Microsoft Office 2010.