Jeanette S.

Escobar
How to create notifications and reminders through excel

Now that you’ve started using a document such as our leave tracking spreadsheet on Excel and
have invited your team to view and edit, you know it can be super helpful to know when they’ve
taken any actions on this file. After all, being kept in the loop is always a good thing, isn’t it?

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to coordinate these actions and be notified when something
important happens—like a coworker leaving the comment “lol” on a spreadsheet. You get what
we mean.

Long story short, you can set up alerts in Excel to keep track of all changes being made in your
leave-tracking spreadsheet! There are many ways to go about it, and we’ll be showing you the
best 3 ways to set up Excel notifications in this article.

Excel notifications: how do they work?

Notifications are key in helping your company run like a well-oiled machine during all times of
the year.

They’re a great way to keep everyone on your team informed about all upcoming leaves so that
you don’t have to deal with any last-minute leave surprises during the busy season or the day of
an important deadline. But achieving the same results using just Excel is harder than you’d think
it is.

Can Excel actually send users notifications?

The answer is a combination of yes and no.

Excel cannot email an alert to you automatically unless you write a macro in the Visual Basic
(VBA) editor to perform this function. And, the reminder Alert only works if the Excel software
is open. Not quite the convenient method you were hoping for, right? So, until Microsoft decides
to provide a functioning solution, we have to settle for workarounds, using macros plus a little
manual intervention to work with setting up alerts on your document.
There are three different ways you can choose to track changes on your file — here’s how each
of them works:

 Alerts on SharePoint – You can receive notifications right within Word, PowerPoint, or
Excel, when people you’ve shared your file with make changes, edits, comments, etc.
 Version History Panel – You can track any edits or view changes that were made to your
file using OneDrive
 Reminders in Excel – To keep track of deadlines or employee absences, you can set up
your spreadsheet with reminders

Lastly, you can also type in additional code to reprogram your file and send emails using Power
Automate. However, this only works if you are logged into OneDrive and have a Microsoft 365
subscription.