Meraz Al Nahian
The article will show you how to stop notes from moving in Excel. Sometimes you may need to give some instructions to your employees and for that reason, it will be good for you to put some notes beside their names if you use Excel to monitor them. But these notes may become a bit messy if you insert new columns afterward. I’ll be describing the necessary steps to fix these notes in their respective position.
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2 Ways to Stop Notes from Moving in Excel
In the dataset, we have assigned some tasks to the employees and set the time duration for the completion of their task. We also added some instructions as notes.
Problems of Moving Notes
If you don’t use proper settings and you insert new columns, your notes will move to other columns like the following picture.
This is a problem because we want our notes close to the employee names. And in the following description, I’ll give you two simple solutions to this problem.
1. Using Format Comment Feature to Stop Notes from Moving in Excel
This is one of the easiest ways to stop notes from moving in Excel. We will be using Note Property from the Review Tab for this. Let’s see the description below.
Steps:
- If you don’t know how to put notes in Excel, select the cell that you want to be noted and go to Review >> Notes >> New Note
- The Format Comment window will appear. From Properties >> select Don’t move or size with cells. Do this for other notes
- Later, click OK.
- After that, the notes are fixed in their respective positions. They won’t move even though you insert a new column or enhance the column width.
If you increase your column width, it won’t change it’s place either.
Thus you can stop your notes from moving in Excel using the comment Property.
Read More: Difference Between Threaded Comments and Notes in Excel
2. Using VBA to Stop Notes from Moving in Excel
You can also stop your notes from moving by using Microsoft Visual Basic for Application (VBA). Let’s go through the procedure below for a better understanding.
Steps:
- First, go to Developer >> Visual Basic.
- After that, the VBA Editor will appear. Select Insert >> Module to open a new Module.
- Later, type the following code in the VBA Module.
Sub StopNotes()
Dim Cmnt As Comment
For Each Cmnt In ActiveSheet.Comments
   Range("D" & Cmnt.Parent.Row).Comment.Shape.Placement = xlFreeFloating
Next Cmnt
End Sub
Code Explanation
- First, we named our Sub Procedure as StopNotes.
- After that, we declared variable Cmnt as Comment.
- Later, we used a For Loop to detect all the rows that contain a note and fix them in their position.
- Finally, we Save the code.
- Now go back to your sheet and Run the Macro.
- If you insert a column, it won’t move the notes.
- Also, if you increase the column width, the notes won’t move either.
Thus you can stop your notes from moving in Excel using VBA.
- Thereafter, if you want you can check the Property
- To bring the Format Comment box follow Method-1.
- Here, in Properties tab you will see the option Don’t move or size with cells is selected.
Read More: How to Remove Notes in Excel (5 Easy Ways)
Practice Section
In this section, I’ll give you the dataset of this article so that you can practice these methods on your own.
Conclusion
In the end, you will learn the basic ideas of how to stop notes from moving in Excel. This will be pretty annoying for you if you don’t fix the positions of the notes in their adjacent cells. If you have any better methods or questions or feedback regarding this article, please share them in the comment box. This will help me enrich my upcoming articles. For more queries, kindly visit our website.
