Tip of the Week: Show Changes in Excel

Collaboration is a crucial part of the workplace, and with the advent of cloud-based solutions and the collaboration functionality they provide, more developers are striving to include such features in their desktop versions as well. Microsoft Excel allows you to see certain changes made to a spreadsheet over a period of time.

What Edits Can You See?

Excel gives you the ability to see changes made to cells and formulas for up to 60 days, including the moving, sorting, inserting, and deleting of cells or data. Unfortunately, you cannot see changes made to things like formatting, hidden cells, filtering, deleted locations, objects, charts, shapes, and pivot table operations.

How Can You See the Edits?

The functionality we’ll be using today is the Show Changes feature. To get started, open up your Excel document and navigate to the Review tab, where you will see the Changes section of the ribbon. Click on the Show Changes button to see a pane open on the right side of the screen showcasing all of the changes made to this document.

In the change section, you will see the sheet, item, and cell that was edited. From here, you just click on the cell number to see what specifically was changed. These appear as highlighted sections on your spreadsheet.

Pretty handy stuff, right? With this tip, you’ll always be able to check which parts of your spreadsheet were edited… so long as it has been within 60 days, anyway.

What are your thoughts on this feature? Be sure to get a hold of us at (703) 821-8200 if you ever have any questions about your technology.