Add Formatting to Comments in Excel

Sections:

Format Text within a Comment

Format the Comments Appearance

Access All Formatting and Adjustment Options for Comments

Notes

Format Text within a Comment

Format the appearance of the text in the comment.

1. Right-click the cell that contains the comment and click Edit Comment. This makes it easier to work with.
   
2. The comment should now be visible and editable; select the text in the comment.
   
3. Go to the Home tab and you can change basic text elements, such as size, font, bold, underline, alignment, etc. Make sure to separately select the parts of the comment to which you would like to apply different formatting, such as font size.
   

Format the Comments Appearance

This includes changing the font color, adding background colors, designs, and other features.

1. Right-click the cell that contains the comment and click Edit Comment
   
   
2. Right-click the border of the comment and then click Format Comment...; the border is the thick spotted line around the comment.
   
3. A window will open with many options for changing a comment's appearance.
   
4. The best thing to do is to play around with this window for a while to see what kind of affects you might want for your comment.
   The most-used features are on the Colors and Lines tab. There, you can add some color to the background of the comment, change the border color, add transparency to the comment, and more. These three particular options allow you to make subtly nice looking comments which do not interfere with the usage of the spreadsheet as much as do the default comments.
   

Sample Formatted Comments:

Access All Formatting and Adjustment Options for Comments

Right-click the cell containing the comment > Click Edit Comment > Right-click the border of the comment > click Format Comment...

In the window that opens, you have access to all of the changes that can be made to a comment, its text, and its appearance.

Notes

Formatting comments can really help make your workbook look A LOT better; this is because Excel's default formatting for comments is incredibly intrusive and quite annoying. Play around with the formatting options for comments to find a suitable look for your workbook.

Download the sample Excel workbook attached to this tutorial to see the examples used here.