Track Changes in Excel

In today’s environment you will come across with many instances where you have to share your workbook to get used by other multiple users. Now question comes what if they have done any change how will you know as an administrator. You might want to track when the change was made, who made the change, what cell the change occurred in and what data was changed.

This article will help you to do get a solution for above problem.

Excel is having a built in feature which can help us to track the changes in excel file. We can easily review the changes on the worksheet and we can even accept and reject the changes.

There are couple of rules which we need to follow while using above feature

        1)    We cannot revert the worksheet to its original state. If you want to do the same check the tracking record    and change the value manually.

        2)    Tracking changes just record the data changes not the formatting changes

        3)    By default history will be available for 30 days.

        4)    As soon we will start the tracking, workbook will become shared workbook.

Here the steps which we can follow

Create One Excel File

Click Review Tab

Click Track Changes

Click Highlight Changes

Click on Track Changes While editing

Select information for When,Where and Who

Provide Cell No in reference for which you want to tracking to enabled

That’s it, now whenever anybody will change the values, cell will highlight and if you move cursor to that

We have the option to track the changes also. We can generate the summary report by following below steps

Click on Review

Click in Share Workbook

Go to advanced tab, change the days and click ok

Select the highlight cell

Click on Track Changes

Select highlight changes

Select checkbox of “List Changes into new sheet”

That’s it your changes history will be available in new sheet like below

At some point you’ll need to either approve or reject the changes. You can review all the changes and then pick and choose which ones you want to keep or discard.

Simply click on Track Changes again and choose Accept/Reject Changes. Select the options to choose which changes you want to accept or reject. If you want to review all changes, just leave When checked and make sure it is set to Not Reviewed.

Click OK and Excel will begin to show you each change that was made and give you the option to Accept orReject. You can also Accept All or Reject All changes if you like.

Click on Review

Select Track Changes

Select Highlight Changes

Accept/Reject based on situation

Hope this feature will help you in many ways..

Thanks,

Sanjay Bakshi

mesanjaybakshi@gmail.com