It’s often obvious, but some of the more complex formulas you can cook up in Excel might require a bit more of an explanation. For that, there’s a pretty simple trick – one that’s not immediately obvious – to add descriptions to your formula, without altering the outcome. 

Open an Excel workbook. If it’s a new workbook, you’ll want to create a simple formula from some dummy data. Or, you could open an existing workbook and attempt to comment on a formula you made previously. Save first, just to be safe.

Add your formula like you usually would. There are a number of ways to do this, but we’ll just add a simple formula totaling amounts from all the cells in column D. 

In the text area where the formula displays, add a space, and the following bit of text: +N(“What I’d like to say”). The text within the quotation marks can say whatever you’d like, and it won’t appear on the spreadsheet. 

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