Changing Comment Shapes

Let’s have some fun today. Not just ordinary Excel fun but ridiculous useless feature fun.

For those of you that have 2010, Microsoft programmers spent countless hours adding bling to Excel.

Take a look at this boring worksheet….

As you can see in cell A1 there is a hidden comment (indicated by the little red triangle). However If we mouse over the comment, we see a wondrous surprise.

So how do you change the shape of a comment? Well if you have Excel 2007 or earlier, I am afraid you are out of luck. But for those of you that have 2010, here are the steps.

1                     Select the comment

2                     Go to the drawing menu.  I needed to add this to my QAT (quick access toolbar).

3                     To add the drawing menu, from the File menu select Options, then Quick Access Toolbar.

4                     Change Choose commands from to Drawing Tools \ Format Tab.

5                     Highlight Change Shape, and then click the Add button then the OK button.

        
    6                  Next select the cell comment, then choose change auto shape option.

Now to really blow your mind. Add Shape Fill and Shape Outline to the QAT just like you did earlier for Change Shape.

This will allow you to change the color of your comment.

While I can see where someone might want to point out something with a comment. I am hard pressed to find a practical business use for changing a comments shape.

However my 11 year old son thinks this is the best!

Changing the width of multiple columns.

There are 3 simple ways to change the width of multiple columns.


Take a look at the below data from an old KPI dashboard post I did a ways back. Notice that the text in each column does not fit (the columns are too small to display all the data).

Now I can change the column widths by first selecting the columns I wish to change. I do this by left mouse clicking on the letter A to highlight the entire column A. Then while holding down the left mouse button, I drag the mouse to the right until I get to column H. I then release the mouse button. The result is that all columns A – H are now selected (highlighted as in the below example.)

Next I want to double click on one of the boarders between any of the highlighted columns. In this example you can see that a double arrow appears when you position the mouse pointer between columns B and C.

If I double click on the double arrow, all highlighted columns will auto fit based on the maximum length of data in each column.

Alternatively I could also left mouse click and drag the arrow to the right or left, all the cells will adjust to the width I drag the cursor.

I personally like the double click since it spaces each column based on the data in that column.
A third way is to select all the columns on the worksheet by clicking on the select all reference.

Then from the ribbon, choose the Home tab and Format > column width or Autofit columns Width.

How do you adjust the width of multiple columns?