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In
today's Microsoft Tutorial on Excel, we will cover Review Tab.
This Tab has functionality that will let you proof read your
Excel workbooks, add and delete comments, protect and
unprotect Excel sheets/workbooks and finally allow users to
track changes in a multi user Excel workbook.
The review
Tab has the following Groups:
Proofing Group
Comments Group
Changes
Group
For
our practice today we are going to revisit the Grades Excel
workbook that you have already seen in a prior lesson.
Here is a screen shot of the Review Tab.
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Proofing Group
:
The first Group that we will look at is
Proofing. This has commands for checking spelling and
grammar, using research and Thesaurus and ability to translate
from one language to another. Let us take a look at some
of these commands next. You are done working on your
grade book and would like to check the spellings. You
can click on spelling command which will invoke the spelling
dialog box as shown below.
Notice that it found
an incorrect spelling in cell L2. It also made some
suggestions for the correct word which is Percent. Go
ahead and click on Change to accept the suggestion.
Remember you can also ignore ones that are correct or do not
need to be changed. The Spell Checker will skip over such
words and continue to check rest of your Excel sheet.
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Next we will
look at the Research command which can be beneficial to look
up information using online reference sources. For
example I selected the word average in cell A15 and then
clicked on Research on the Proofing Group on the Review
Tab. This invoked the research dialog box on the right
side as visible below. As you scroll down a little bit,
you can see that it found not only the correct pronunciation
but some common meanings for this work, very
cool!
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The next
feature is the one that I use a lot as I find myself repeating
the same words over and over again. Using Thesaurus,
Microsoft Excel 2007 will suggest words with similar meanings
which can be used as alternates. On the computer screen
capture below, you can see that it found the word Mean as an
alternate to Average.
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The
Translate command can be quite handy if you happen to work in
a multilingual environment. Let us say that you would
like to change the word average from English to Arabic. You
can click on translate command which will bring up a new
dialog box which I have expanded here so you can see the
options a little bit better. Notice that not only did it
suggests the word but was able to show the word in Arabic as
well.
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Comments
Group:
The next set of commands has to do with the Comments
Group in Microsoft Excel 2007. if you happen to be
working on a complex Excel project with several other people,
it may be hard to track all the comments and changes from
different sources. Using the comments functionality,
Excel will let you add your notes and even include the user
information.
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How about we
try to add a few comments? For the student Joe Reboot, I
feel the project points are way too low. So I went ahead
and clicked on New Comment under Comments Group. This added a
yellow comment box with my name and a blinking cursor around
it. This is shown right below. A red triangle in the
upper-right corner of the commented cell is also visible for
easy location
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Similarly I
added another comment in cell E12 at for Jason’s midterm
score. I went ahead and saved the document. Let’s
assume that someone else opens this Excel sheet and would like
to review all the comments so for. They can easily click
on the command Show All Comments. Excel displays all
comment boxes on the current worksheet. Clicking the Show All
Comments button again turns off the comment display.If the
user has proper access, they can delete these comments and
create their new ones.
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Changes
Group:
Microsoft Excel 2007 has quite a bit of
functionality in the security arena. This is a big improvement
over the prior versions like Microsoft Excel 2003. There may
be times when you would like to keep confidential information
secure from modification and even control the structure of the
workbook in Excel 2007.
Protect Sheet command will
prevent users from accidental updating or deleting vital
information from the spreadsheet. You can click on
Protect Sheet under the Changes Group. This is going to
bring up the time a dialog box titled the Protect Sheet.
This is where you can enter a password along with several
other options to limit actions in your worksheet. Go
ahead enter a password and leave the default settings and then
click OK. This is shown in the following
figure.
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Next Excel
2007 will you will ask you to reenter the password to enable
the security feature. Here’s the Confirm Password dialog
box that I got on my computer screen. You can now close the
worksheet.
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After
protecting the sheet we need to test if this actually work.
Open the Grades Workbook again and try to change data in Excel
sheet. Notice you were unable to do so and you also received a
dialog box similar to the one below informing you that this
data is read only.
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If you
wanted to make modifications, you would need to remove the
protection using the Unprotect command under the Changes
Group. Go ahead and click on Unprotect sheet command.
This will invoke the dialog box where you are prompted to
enter the password. Enter the password and then click
OK. Now you are back to your original sheet where you
can make modifications to the data. Awesome!
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In addition
to protecting sheet you can also protect your workbook in
Microsoft Excel. This prevents changes to the structure
of the workbook and can also be utilized to control window
functions like minimizing or closing worksheets. How
about we try this functionality next?
When you click on
protect workbook command, you will get a dropdown where you
will select Protect Structure and Windows.
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Next You
will get a similar dialog box to the one we have seen before.
Go ahead and check the options for structure and windows,
entered a password and then click OK.
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The changes
from the previous step are quite subtle but you can see them
if you look closely. The first thing that you will notice is
missing window resizing buttons in the top right area and
highlighted by the red rectangle. The second thing
you’ll see is on the right click menu and, the commands for
altering the worksheet properties are now disabled. We
have included a screen shot of this right below.
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The last
functionality that we will look at is protecting and sharing
your workbook. This will let you protect your data using
a password when working on a collaboration. In addition
you can enable tracking changes using this command as.
When you click on Protect and Share Workbook, you will get the
following dialog box. This is where you can check the
box for sharing the track changes by entering a
password.
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Microsoft
Excel 2007 invokes a new dialog box titled Highlight
Changes. Here you can choose which options you would
like to enable for tracking changes. I checked the
boxes for When, Who and Where. You need to make sure
that in the where clause text box, you highlight all of your
tracked data. Finally click OK to complete the
steps.
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TextNext
proceed to make a few changes in your workbook. In our case,
we made a comment about the midterm average being too low in
cell E16. We also changed to score for Paulee Manson for
chapter 4 and finally added another comment in the first row
under column J. Go ahead and saved the document.
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Now if your
colleague would like to know what changes were made?
They can simply opens this Excel Workbook, and then
highlight changes using Track Changes command from the Changes
Group. They will be prompted with the same when, who,
where dialog box. They would need to check all the
necessary boxes and then click OK. Next they will be
able to see all the changes that need to be either accepted or
rejected highlighted by a blue rectangle.
Here is a
screen shot of what it looks like shown below.
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