Excel Tool Tips
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A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask about adding comments to his Excel worksheets so that his users would be prompted to take certain input actions. He’s building a series of excel dashboards complete with data input screens.
I directed him to Michael Alexander’s latest Excel Tip: Adding Tool Tips to Cells, a quick but excellent video tutorial on how to achieve a tool tip effect such as you see below:

The tool tip is easy to implement in Excel. Don’t use a “comment” - see video to see why. Instead, use Data Validation/Input Message. Simply click on a cell, go to Data, then Data Validation. On the Settings tab, under validation criteria, choose Allow Any Value. Then go to the Input Message text box and enter your tool tip.
View the video to see how simple this is.
Michael Alexander of DataPigTechnologies.com is the author of Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies
Also, be sure to catch his video on Creating Bullet Charts in Excel.
Tags: Excel techniques for Business Intelligence Dashboards

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