This leaves a lot of room for changes and the concept of simply marking a row whenever something changed somewhere on that row is impossible. That is as if every cell could contain a Word document of 15 pages! And finally, the number of sheets is only limited by the available memory of your machine. In Excel, you can have up to 17 billion cells per sheet and each of these cells can have up to 32,767 characters. In Word, you can just scroll down from the top to the bottom of your document and you will be told by the vertical line on the side if it contains any changes. Why is tracking changes in Excel so much harder than in Word? Issue 1: Excel has cells, and loads of them! So, what makes it so hard to apply the same technique to Microsoft Excel? The remainder of this post looks at the technical issues, why Microsoft’s solution failed and how the issue can be solved.
Formatting changes are shown in the Reviewing Pane to the right. In track changes mode, Word will mark deleted words by crossing them and added words by underlining them in a different color for each author. Now you can jump from one change to the other, accepting the changes that you like.
You can send your draft to your boss, she can do a few edits (with track changes turned on) and send it back to you. Word has a built-in tool to track changes which makes it a lot easier to collaborate on the same document. A better way to track changes in Excel workbooks.Microsoft’s (legacy) solution: Track changes in shared workbooks.
Why is tracking changes in Excel so much harder than in Word?.In this blog post, we’ll see why it is so much harder in Excel to track changes than it is in Word and show a better alternative than Microsoft’s co-authoring. While co-authoring is great (especially if you are coming from Google sheets), it seems to be a solution to a different problem. The track changes functionality of shared workbooks has so many limitations that it was officially stamped as “legacy” and replaced by the new co-authoring functionality. Track changes in Word is one of the hottest features, but Microsoft has been struggling with providing an equivalent feature for Excel.