This can cause formulas to break, etc, so be careful. It’s worth noting that if another cell references the contents of the rejected cell, then that value will also change when the referenced cell value reverts back. If you reject a change, it will immediately revert back to what was originally in that cell. You can also Accept All or Reject All changes if you like. If you want to review all changes, just leave When checked and make sure it is set to Not Reviewed.Ĭlick OK and Excel will begin to show you each change that was made and give you the option to Accept or Reject. Select the options to choose which changes you want to accept or reject. Simply click on Track Changes again and choose Accept/Reject Changes. You can review all the changes and then pick and choose which ones you want to keep or discard. A new worksheet called History will be added that will let you view all the changes that have been made to that workbook.Īt some point you’ll need to either approve or reject the changes. Once you have enabled tracking and made a few changes, you can click on the Track Changes button again, click on Highlight Changes and you’ll notice that the List changes on a new sheet box is no longer grayed out.Ĭheck that and click OK. Lastly, you can choose how you want to deal with conflicts: either by being asked or simply letting the last change when saving the file win. By default, changes are updated when the file is saved, but you can make it so that it is automatically done every few minutes. Here you can change the number of days for keeping change history to something other than 30 days. Click on the Advanced tab when the Share Workbook dialog pops up.
To do this, click on the Share Workbook button that is directly to the left of the Track Changes button. The next step is to take a look at the settings for tracking and adjust them to fit your needs. So what you can do, for example, is hide the changes on the screen by not checking the box, send out your file to everyone who has to make changes to it, and when you get it back, just go to Track Changes and recheck the box. If you deselect the Highlight changes on screen option, that little black triangle won’t show up. By default, once you start tracking and this option is selected, any changed cell will show a small arrow at the top left to indicate it was changed.Īlso, if you click on a changed cell (with Highlight changes on screen turned on), you’ll get a little popup window showing what the value was changed from and changed to and at what time. Just click the button at the right and select the range of cells you want to keep track of.įinally, you can un-check the Highlight changes on screen option if you do not want others to know you are tracking changes. The Where option allows you to track changes only for a specific portion of the spreadsheet. If you check Who, you can choose to track changes made by anyone or changes made by everyone except you. You also have the option of highlighting changes from the last time you saved the document, since a specific date, or changes that have not yet been reviewed. For When, All means every change will be highlighted. You have several options here including When, Who, and Where. You’ll get a dialog box where you now need to check off the option “Track changes while editing. At the far right, you should see an option called Track Changes under the Changes section.Ĭlick the button and choose Highlight Changes. Open Excel and click on the Review tab on the ribbon. Let’s go ahead and turn on tracking first.
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Now that you know some basics of how tracking works in Excel, let’s talk about how to enable it, change settings and keep track of changes! Enabling Tracking This means that multiple users will be making changes to the document. Whenever your turn on tracking, the workbook becomes a shared workbook. That means the next time you open it, you won’t be able to see that change you had made 45 days earlier.Ĥ.
When you close it, any change history older than 30 days will be gone. If you make changes to an Excel worksheet and then open the workbook again 45 days later, then you’ll be able to see the change history for all 45 days until you close the workbook. Change history is only kept for 30 days by default. Other changes that are not tracked include hiding/unhiding rows and columns, comments, and cell values that change to due a formula recalculation.ģ. Any data stored in a cell is tracked, but other changes like formatting are not. Turning on tracking doesn’t mean every single change you make will be recorded. You can manually go and see what data was deleted or added, but you’ll have to make the changes to the spreadsheet yourself.Ģ. It’s basically a log file that records everything and that’s it. Turning on tracking does not mean that you can revert the spreadsheet back in time to a previous state by undoing the changes.