The problem with objects on an Excel spreadsheet (graphs, pictures, comments or anything that hovers over the cells) is that when you make changes to the size of rows or columns, these shapes tend to move and resize with them. So your perfect square comment becomes a long elongated rectangle when you widen a column to fit in the text. So can you stop excel comments moving or resizing?
For comments it is as simple as the following.
Create your comment and show it. Click on the border of the comment so that the shape is highlighted (not a flashing cursor in the text). Right click on the comment border and choose the Format Comment option.
You will see you have a number of options which are worth exploring but the one we are looking for is the Properties option. Choose whether you want the comment to ‘move and size with cells’ or ‘move but don’t size with cells’ and click OK. Now the comment will stay still and the same size no matter what you do with the underlying cells.
Notice that with this method you can control the following aspects of a comment:
- Font size, colour, effects and more
- Alignment of the text within a comment
- Colours, widths and style of lines
- Size
- Treatment of comments when protection is enabled, and
- Margins within the comment box
Similarly with graphs you need to right click on the graph and search for the same option within properties to specify how a graph should re act when cell sizes are changed. The different versions of Excel have put this in different places but you can see an example in the Excel Charts Chart Area video clip.
Stop Excel Comments moving on a Mac
On the Mac version of Excel, the right click option is not always available or greyed out. In this case do the following as shown below.
(1)- click on the outside part of the comment box, (2) in the Home ribbon, choose (3) the format dropdown. and click on (4) the Format Comment option. This allows access to the Property field.
These and more are available in our Excel Dashboard course