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.
![trackchanges_1 trackchanges_1](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_1.png)
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.
![trackchanges_2 trackchanges_2](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_2.png)
![imgexcel2007 excel2007](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/imgexcel2007.png)
You can change the User Name here & click OK:
![trackchanges_3 trackchanges_3](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_3.png)
To start tracking changes, go to the Review tab -> Track Changes -> Highlight Changes
![trackchanges_4 trackchanges_4](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_4.png)
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.
![trackchanges_5 trackchanges_5](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_5.png)
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.
![trackchanges_6 trackchanges_6](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_6.png)
You will now be able to see comments like below:
![trackchanges_7 trackchanges_7](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_7.png)
Even better, you can churn out a report to see ALL changes by going here again:
![trackchanges_8 trackchanges_8](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_8.png)
This time, check the box for “List changes on a new sheet” & click OK.
![trackchanges_9 trackchanges_9](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_9.png)
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.
![trackchanges_10 trackchanges_10](http://advanced-excel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/trackchanges_10.png)