Excel - Comments Not Showing/Non-editable

Question

Hi there. Looking for help with a problem that neither our IT team or myself have been able to fix that is affecting both current and new workbooks. I have a file with numerous comments/annotations in there but they've now stopped showing when you hover over them. It just shows a grey box with my name instead. You can create a new one when you first enter but as soon as you submit, it disappears completely and cannot be seen again.

Additionally, when you go to make an edit to an existing one, the pencil icon just changes every single comments to state 'Another comment is in progress' locking up every other comment. This happens no matter where you go to edit them. Again, this is the same on any comment trying to edit.

The comments show in the 'Show Comments' button section, which is fine but they cannot be edited like the above, and when you go to click on which comment is apparently in progress, it just takes you to the last one created being edited (which also incidentally features the 'comment in progress' message.

This isn't just limited to existing spreadsheets but also if I open a new one the same issue exists.

I've checked the settings under Options -> Advanced, tried restarting Excel, tried repairing Excel, tried making sure all Windows updates are done, tried a clean install of Excel through Office 365 and none of these have worked. The only option left we could try was trying to make the computer go back to an earlier system restore point to see if one of the latest windows updates was having an effect but my computer hadn't been set up to create system restore points, so that was a complete no go. None of the existing help guides online are possible (some articles suggest dragging out column sizes/widths, dragging out the size of the comments box but there's literally no change and/or the feature to drag out comments boxes doesn't exist).

Using a Dell Vostro 7620 on Windows 11 Business, and only started with the issue a few days ago but is seemingly non-resolvable. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It seems bug in current version.

Disable office update and rollback to previous version of office as temporary workaround.

How to revert to an earlier version of Office - Microsoft Support

You may also send feedback to Microsoft. Hope Microsoft will release the bug fix soon.

Send feedback to Microsoft with the Feedback Hub app - Microsoft Support