While Microsoft Excel's comments and notes tools both let you annotate a cell, they serve different purposes, work in diverse ways, and vary in how they look on a printed Excel worksheet.

We show you how to add a tooltip in Excel and Google Sheets using comments, notes, data validation, and screen tip the easy way.

In Excel for Microsoft 365, you have ‘Comments’ and ‘Notes’ as separate features. Notes offer a traditional way of adding comments or annotations to a cell value in Excel.