Excel annotations in OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice: a simple solution for an annoyance

OpenOffice.Org and  LibreOffice are outstanding office productivity suites that can compete with any version of Microsoft Office. Both are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. On my laptop though, first with OpenOffice and, later on, with LibreOffice, I had an annoyance that I needed to solve: when opening documents that were originally created in Excel, and when seeing that a text annotation was made in a cell, I was able to see that the annotation was there. But I just couldn’t read its content. It was just as if the contrast was not high enough to allow the text in the annotation to appear. Now if you’re ever in that situation, just do the following. In your Open- or Libreoffice program, click on Extra -> Options -> Appearance. Look for “Annotations background” and change the default setting (some kind of yellow) to anything else. The color of the annotation should now change to the new color, and you should be able to see the text in the annotation. Now save your imported Excel file just in the original format (xls), and close OpenOffice. Re-open the file. The annotation color should be the new color, and you should be able do see the Excel annotations quite normally. Check it out!

excel annotations