Cell Comments in Spreadsheets
Do you add #comments into your spreadsheets? That’s #7 on our list of the "Top 10 Dysfunctions of #Spreadsheets”. Learn more here. 👇
Adding comments into cells directly within a spreadsheet may make sense in some use cases, for a quick back and forth with a teammate. And we use them too!
One key tip -- be sure to keep those comments as purely … #commentary. i.e., notes or questions about the data. Once your comments start to turn into #data, you may start in motion a precedent that can get expensive to unravel later. 😖
#CaseStudy — we had a client who baked in years of comments within a spreadsheet tracking licensing expiration and renewal dates with 3rd parties. Those comments ranged from ad-hoc exchanges to fairly critical information such as reminder dates, contractual obligations, and $ amounts. ‼️
Our experts devised a cool way to grab the raw text from the underlying #XML out of #Sharepoint + #Excel, and to present that to the users to parse and enter into a robust database. That’s all possible, to be sure!
The challenge to unravel information like this after the fact comes from the lack of standardization. Free-form text box tends toward free-form data entry. And comments, be they on a specific cell or comments about the entire sheet, tend toward very free-form style.
Two tips:
In a #spreadsheet, we’d recommend simply adding a #column or two to track notes and comments. That makes it all a bit more #WYSIWYG — what you see is what you get, out in the open for all to clearly see.
Comments have the seeming benefit of hiding themselves, collapsing into that little handy triangle icon, which keeps your columns nice and compact. But just like people, each of our strengths can also be a weakness.
Hidden data can become a little "silent killer” in your quest to keep your data clean. If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it.
Comments do allow you to assign tasks/ownership to one another in Google Sheets. That’s fairly handy, to be sure. So consider using a mix of a new column to track all of the notes, plus assigning some ownership for the entire cell using the comments feature.
Also consider adding some #instructions and #guidelines in the column header about what type of information you expect within that set of comments (i.e., “Please add any notes or questions here. Please use the Key Dates tab for any dates, and do not place them within these notes.”)
In a #RapidApp development environment such as #Claris #FileMaker, you can create a rich comments log, storing the history of an exchange, with clear ownership and date-time stamps.
You can also create connections so that your would-be free-form comments now tie directly to data. For example, you could require comments with each key status change within a contract management module. Now we’re really talkin’ to each other!
With a robust software application, you’ll be driving a rich data exchange that’s trackable and flexible for whatever the future brings!
Thank you.
