Problems With Pivot Table Comments

In some pivot tables, you might want to add comments to a few cells, to help the users understand what the results mean, or to explain the different pivot fields. However, if you add comments to a pivot table, you’ll run into a couple of problems.

Add a Comment to the Pivot Table

The Insert Comment command doesn’t appear in the popup menu if you right-click on a pivot table cell.

To insert a comment in a pivot table:

  1. Select the cell where you want the comment.
  2. On the Excel Ribbon, click the Review tab
  3. Click New Comment

Tooltips Block the Comments

One problem with comments in a pivot table is that the contextual tooltips might appear when you point to a pivot table cell that contains a comment. In the screen shot below, you can see the red comment marker, but the comment isn’t visible.

Comments01

If you decide to use comments, follow these steps, to turn off the tooltips feature.

  1. Right-click a cell in the pivot table, and then click PivotTable options.
  2. In the PivotTable Options dialog box, on the Display tab, remove the check mark from Show contextual tooltips and then click OK.

Comments02

After you turn off this setting, the comment appears when you point to the cell.

Comments03

Pivot Table Comments Don’t Move

When you add comments to cells in the pivot table, the comments are attached to the Excel worksheet cell, rather than to the pivot item’s cell. If you change the pivot table layout, the comments won’t move with the item, and the comments could end up confusing the users instead of helping them.

In the screen shot below, a new field has been added to the row area. The comment was originally added to cell D10, that had a value of 91, for cracker sales in Seattle. Now the layout has changed, but the comment is still in cell D10. That cell now has a value of 198, and summarizes cracker sales at store 3074 in Detroit.

Comments04

Alternative to Comments

Instead of inserting comments in the pivot table, you could add a column to the source data, and enter brief comments there. A user who has a question about the data in the pivot table could double-click on the cell, using the Show Details feature to extract the source data and read any notes entered.

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9 thoughts on “Problems With Pivot Table Comments”

  1. Hi. I have this problem and really want to put comments along side my pivot table. I don’t have the option to put the data in the sauce data as I need it on the same sheet as the pivot table and there are a lot of individual lines that get updated from a download off a system. Is there any other way? Thank you!

  2. Phil,

    Have you found a solution yet? I am also needing to put commnents alogn side my pivot table.

    Thank YOu,

  3. If there is a expand/collapse button (the + and – button) in the sheet, the comments do not move along with the data. They remain in the same cell.

    Is there any way we can move the comment along with the cell data?

  4. I set up a comments field in my source data that concatenated information to identify the line that needed a comment, and then added it to the pivot table using a slicer. The comments appear for everything visible, but with a well formed note and concatenation/if statement to not show blanks, it works ok.

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