Clear All Comments

What it does

A workbook accumulates comments the way a margin accumulates notes. After a few years of multiple authors, every cell has a stale "TODO: revisit", "from Mike", or "need to confirm with Sarah" comment that no longer means anything to anyone. The macro walks your selection, asks for confirmation, and deletes every cell comment in one pass. Cell values and formulas are untouched; only the comment objects are removed.

Real-world example

Picture a controller at a 12-year-old company about to share the master accounting workbook with a new outside CPA firm. The workbook has been edited by 8 different staff over its lifetime. Every tab has dozens of comments: "ask Steve about this", "from Joan, 2019", "follow up after April close", many of which reference people who left years ago.

The new CPA firm doesn't need (or want) the comment archaeology. Sharing the file with all those notes makes the workbook look messy and adds questions like "who's Steve" to the conversation.

His current method: walk each tab, right-click each cell with a comment indicator, Delete Comment. With about 200 comments across 18 tabs, that's roughly 30 to 40 minutes of right-click-and-confirm.

With this macro he selects all on each tab, runs the tool, confirms when prompted, and 200 comments disappear in 1 second total across the 18 tabs. The popup confirms count per tab.

On an 18-tab inherited workbook with 200 comments, expect about 35 minutes saved per cleanup. The bigger win is consistency: every comment is gone, not just the ones he remembered to right-click.

How to use

First time? See How to run our tools for the 30-second setup.

Save the workbook first. Comment deletion is irreversible without a backup.

1. Select the range with comments to clear. For a whole sheet, Ctrl+A (twice).
2. Press Alt + F8 (Windows) or Option + F8 (Mac), pick ClearAllComments, click Run.
3. Confirm the deletion when prompted.
4. The macro deletes every comment in your selection and reports the count.

FAQ

Does it delete threaded comments (the modern Microsoft 365 conversation kind)?

No, only legacy Notes (the yellow-triangle kind). Threaded comments use a different VBA property (CommentThreaded) that isn't reliably available across all Excel versions, especially on Mac. For most inherited workbooks the comments are Notes anyway.

Can I undo it?

No. Comment deletion isn't undoable in Excel. Save the workbook before running so you can recover by closing without saving and reopening. The macro shows a confirmation prompt to make this explicit.

What if I want to delete only my own comments and keep others'?

The macro doesn't filter by author. To delete by author, you'd need a custom macro that checks cell.Comment.Author. Edit the .bas source if needed; it's a one-line addition to the inner loop.

What about cell history or change tracking?

The macro only deletes comments. Excel's separate "Track Changes" feature has its own log; this macro doesn't touch it.

Can I use this to delete just the comment indicators (the tiny red triangles) without deleting the comment text?

No, deleting a comment removes both the indicator and the text. They're the same object in Excel's model. To hide the indicators while keeping the comments, use File > Options > Advanced > Display > For cells with comments, show: No comments or indicators.

What to do next

To find which cells have comments before deleting, use Highlight Cells With Comments. It paints commented cells light green so you can audit before clearing. The two macros pair: highlight to audit, clear to clean up.