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How to Track Changes in Excel?

By Neha T Leave a Comment

Do want to track changes in excel? We often share our excel spreadsheet with other people to overview it or if required make some changes or updation to it. To know what changes have been made to your excel spreadsheet by others, you can turn on tracking.

As soon as the tracking of an Excel sheet is turned on, it becomes the shared workbook to which multiple users can make changes and those changes will be recorded. The recorded changes have the information regarding who has made the change, when he has made the changes and where he has made the changes and this information is stored in a log file.

Well, it is not that turning on tracking records each and every change. The changes that don’t get tracked are hiding or unhiding of columns or rows, changes that occur in the value of a cell as a result of recalculation of the formula, comments and there may be some more. The changes in the excel sheet are not tracked even if our sheet has inserted table or XML maps.

When you turn on tracking in excel, it keeps a record of changes for the last 30 days. You can view the information about the changes made to your excel sheet in a History sheet maintained by Excel.

Let us move toward the steps of tracking changes in excel. In this section, we will also discuss the steps for accepting or rejecting the tracked changes in excel.

  1. Track Changes
  2. Accept or Reject Changes

Steps to Track Changes in Excel 2016:

Track Changes

Step 1: In your Excel sheet go to the Review tab and under Changes group click on Track Changes dropdown arrow and among the displayed options click on Highlight Changes.

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Step 2: Step 1 will lead you to the Highlight Changes window where initially you have to check the ‘Track changes while editing. This also shares your workbook.’ checkbox. This will make further options available for you.

Under ‘Highlight which changes’ section you can decide from when you want to track changes, of whom you want to track changes and which range of cells in the sheet, you want to track changes.

Also, check ‘Highlight changes on Screen‘ checkbox and click OK.

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It will prompt a message “This action will now save the workbook. Do you want to continue” click OK.

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You can observe that besides the name of your worksheet ‘[Shared]’ has been amended.

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Step 3: Now, whatever changes will be done to your spreadsheet will be highlighted with the purple box around the changed cell/s. If you will hover over your cursor above that purple box it will flash a message indicating the tracked changes as you can see in the image below:

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Step 4: If you want to view the information about all the changes at once. Excel allows you to see the list of all the changes on a different sheet in the same workbook which is name ‘History’ automatically.

Note: To get this History sheet you first have to save whatever changes have been made to the sheet then try to get this History sheet.

To get this History sheet again get that Highlight Changes windows from Track Changes button in Changes group of Review tab. In Highlight Changes window, check on List changes on a new sheet checkbox and click OK.

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Immediately, you will get the History sheet in your workbook. You can observe in the image below, the sheet displays the action number in a sequence, date, time at which changes have been made. Who has made the change? To what & in which sheet and up to which range the changes has been done. What is the new value after the change and what was the old value?
At last, it displays the date and time until when the changes have been recorded.

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Accept/Reject Changes

Excel allows you to manually accept or reject changes made to your workbook. You can decide whose changes you want to accept and whose you want to reject.

Step 1:  Go to the Review tab and in Changes group click on Track Changes and among the displayed options now click on Accept/Reject Changes.

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Step 2: A Select Changes to Accept or Reject window will be displayed where you can select what changes made by whom and when you want to accept or reject. After selecting click OK.

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It will take you to the Accept or Reject Changes window where you can view the changes and promptly decide whether to keep that change or reject that change. If you want to accept the currently showing change click Accept, in case of rejection click Reject. If you want to accept all the selected changes, click on AcceptAll or if you want to reject all the selected changes click RejectAll.

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Your workbook will modify according to the corresponding accepted or rejected changes.

So, this was all about the steps of tracking the changes in excel. We have also discussed how we can accept or reject the tracked changes. Hope the content is useful. Keep reading.

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