Are you looking for a way to track changes made to an Excel spreadsheet. In an earlier post, I wrote how you can protect an Excel workbook using a password , but there are many cases where you have to distribute a file and allow others to edit it also.
In these types of cases, it’s handy to be able to track any changes made to the original Excel spreadsheet. Tracking changes in Excel is fairly straight-forward and here’s how you do it.
First, open Excel and click on the Review ribbon. At the far right, you should see an option called “Track Changes”.
Click the button and choose Hightlight Changes. You’ll get a dialog box where you now need to check off the option “Track change while editing. This also shares your workbook”.
You have several options here for When , Who, and Where. For When, Allmeans every change will be highlighted. 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.
If you select Who, you can choose to track changes made by anyone or changes made by everyone except you. The Where filter allows you to track changes only for a specific portion of the spreadsheet. Just click the button at the right and select the range of cells you want to keep track of.
Finally, you can un-check the Highlight changes on screen option if you do not want others to know you are tracking changes. 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.
If you deselect the Highlight changes on screen option, that little blue arrow won’t show up. Also, 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 to and at what time.
So what you can do, for example, is hide the changes on the screen by not checking the box, then 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 Highlight Changes and recheck the box!
After this, you’ll need to either approve or reject the changes. So even though someone has made a change, it does not necessarily have to be permanent. You can review all the changes and pick and choose which ones you want to keep or want to discard.
Simply click on Track Changes and choose Accept/Reject Changes. Select the options to choose which changes you want to accept or reject. So whatever options you selected when turning on change tracking the first time, choose those again.
Click OK and Excel will begin to show you each change that was made and give you the option to Accept or Reject.
After you have finished reviewing all of the changes you can click on Track Changes again and Highlight Changes, and you’ll notice that the box for “List changes on a new sheet” is now enabled. For some reason this option is not enabled the first time you turn on change tracking in Excel.
Check the box and click OK and now all of the changes that were performed will be shown in a new Excel sheet:
That’s it! Now you can track any changes made to your Excel spreadsheet easily by using this built in feature. By the way, if you read the post mentioned above on how to password protect an Excel file, you might be interested in the article on how to crack an Excel password ! Enjoy!
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/ms-office-tips/track-changes-in-excel/
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