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Adding a tooltip to a cell in Excel is a simple and effective way to provide additional information or context to the data displayed in the cell. To do this, you can use the “Insert Comment” function to create a small pop-up box that appears when the user hovers their cursor over the cell. This allows you to include a brief description or explanation of the data in the cell, making it easier for others to understand and interpret the information. This feature can be especially useful for sharing spreadsheets with colleagues or clients, as it helps to clarify any potential confusion or ambiguity in the data. To add a tooltip in Excel, simply right-click on the cell, select “Insert Comment,” and type in your desired text.
Add Tooltip to Cell in Excel (With Example)
Often you may want to add a tooltip to a cell in Excel so that a message will be displayed when you click on the cell.
Fortunately this is easy to do using the Data Validation feature on the Data tab along the top ribbon in Excel.
The following example shows how to use this feature to add a tooltip to a cell in practice.
Example: How to Add Tooltip to Cell in Excel
Suppose we have an Excel sheet in which we would like an employee at a grocery store to enter the total sales for the week in cell B1:
However, suppose we want a message to appear when the employee clicks in cell B1 to let them know that sales from the deli department should not be included in the total sales.
To create this tooltip, we can first click cell B1. Then, click the Data tab along the top ribbon, then click the Data Validation icon with the Data Tools group:
In the new window that appears, click the Input Message tab along the top.
Then type the following messages into the following boxes:
Title: Enter Total Sales
Input Message: Do not include sales from the deli department.
Then click OK.
Now, when you click on cell B1 a tooltip will automatically appear with the title and input message that you specified:
Note #2: In this example we only created a tooltip for one cell, but you can create a tooltip for as many cells as you’d like in the spreadsheet.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel: