Excel notes formatting issue

Question

If I want to formatting notes it's not supported. There is column - format (edit) - but non active

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Answer 1

Hello @Ruslan Yusupov TeknoDome, 

I hope you're doing well. 

In Excel, Notes (also known as legacy comments) currently do not support formatting through the Format (Edit) column or pane. Because of this, the Format (Edit) option appears inactive when Notes are selected. 

For Notes, formatting can only be applied by editing each note directly: 

• Right‑click the cell 
• Select Edit Note 
• Select the text inside the note to apply basic font formatting, or select the note border to change the background color. 
• Right-click and choose Format comment 

• From here, you can Apply: 
  • Font size 
  • Font type 
  • Bold / Italic 
  • Text color 

This formatting is applied per note, and bulk or column‑level formatting of Notes is currently not supported. 

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At this time, Notes support only basic, manual formatting per note (such as font and background color when editing the note directly), and enhanced or centralized formatting through the Edit column is currently not supported. 

If additional formatting capabilities are important for your workflow, you can submit feedback to show demand from the community at: Excel · Community. The Product Team is in-charge of the feedback site, and they are constantly checking the comments and feedback from our customer. Many features have been developed or improved based on users' comment.  

Submitting and upvoting feedback is the best way to help prioritize this capability for future updates. After submitting your request on the site, you can return here and paste the link into this thread. That way, other users who visit this discussion can click the link and upvote your request to help bring more attention to it.    

In the meantime, you can check Microsoft 365 Roadmap for updating features in the future. I will also forward your feedback to the appropriate team for further consideration.        

I genuinely appreciate your feedback and share your goal of making Excel better and more user-friendly.     

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Answer 2

In recent builds of Excel, issues with notes and threaded comments can cause note-related commands or entry points to be missing or behave incorrectly. This can make formatting options for notes appear unavailable or “non‑active.”

The documented workaround is to close Excel completely and then reopen it, and then try editing/formatting the note again. This refresh often restores the correct behavior of notes and comments, including their formatting controls.

If the problem persists after restarting Excel, use the Excel desktop app (not Excel for the web), because some note/comment features and formatting options are not available in Excel for the web.

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References:

• Threaded comments and notes are displayed incorrectly and the new note entry point is missing in Excel