Tracking Changes in Excel

Tracking changes for a commonly used file among our colleagues helps to highlight the updates made & who made them. Especially if you have a huge set of data & do not want to go through each cell to check. Hence, we can enable “Track Changes” to do that. Here’s an example of a Sales Forecast to be done by the Sales people. There are products from A-Z & 3 worksheets containing different country’s data. The different Sales people are supposed to go into different worksheets to input

forecast figures in Column B for their products they are in charge.

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For the users to be easily identified, each user must first change the User Name. Go to File -> Options -> . If you are an Excel 2007 user, you should see a Windows icon.

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You can change the User Name here & click OK:

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To start tracking changes, go to the Review tab -> Track Changes -> Highlight Changes

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Check the box circled. You can also choose:

i. When you want the changes highlighted. Maybe you might not want to see changes made long ago & choose changes made from a specific date. 

ii. Who you want to see made changes. You might not want to see changes made by yourself.

iii. Where chooses a specific range you want to see changes made. It could be that you don’t care what happens in other columns except Column B.

iv. Highlight changes on screen shows a comment box when you hover over the cell.

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There will be a prompt that the following action will save the workbook. And after saving, every action made to the workbook will be tracked.

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You will now be able to see comments like below:

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Even better, you can churn out a report to see ALL changes by going here again:

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This time, check the box for “List changes on a new sheet” & click OK.

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You can now see every action made by different people, at different dates/time at which cell or worksheet, using what values for now & what was previously there.

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