Google Sheets → Excel

Where did my notes and comments go converting to Excel?

Your Google Sheet had little annotations — some plain cell notes, some back-and-forth comment threads. After a round-trip to Excel you’re not sure which survived, or you’re worried some vanished silently.

What’s actually breaking

Google Sheets has two different annotation systems that look similar but are stored differently. A note is a simple text sticky attached to a cell — the old, lightweight kind, with no author and no replies. A comment is a threaded discussion, with authors, replies, timestamps, and a resolved state. They sit in different places inside the file.

Excel has its own two-system history that only looks like a match. Older Excel “comments” were really cell notes; newer Excel “threaded comments” are the discussion kind. So converting isn’t a clean note→note, comment→comment swap — it’s two products with two overlapping systems each, and the mapping between them isn’t one-to-one. That mismatch is exactly how an annotation can quietly go missing: a threaded comment can land as a flat note stripped of its replies, or a note can be filed as the wrong kind, and nothing warns you it happened.

Concretely: a reviewer’s three-message thread on cell B7 in Sheets might arrive in Excel as a single note reading only the first message — or not arrive at all — while you have no easy way to notice the other two replies are gone.

How xlsx-for-ai handles it

xlsx-for-ai reads both kinds of annotation and tells them apart. Its reader distinguishes legacy notes from threaded comments as it goes through the workbook, so both are surfaced in what it reports back — they aren’t silently swallowed on the way through.

That base capability is what we’re claiming here, and only that: we read your notes and your comments and disclose them, rather than dropping them without a word. You can ask for a workbook’s comments explicitly and see both types listed with the cell they belong to.

What we’re not over-claiming: a fully faithful round-trip of every threaded-comment detail — every reply, author and resolved flag reconstructed exactly on the other side — is a richer job than reading and reporting them, and we’re still hardening the edges of it. The dependable promise today is that neither kind of annotation disappears unseen: you get told what’s there.

How to check your file

  1. Add the connector to Claude once (how).
  2. Ask for the annotations directly. In Claude: 
    Read this Google Sheet with xfa and list every note
and comment, with the cell each one is on:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/YOUR_SHEET_ID/edit
  3. Or from a download — File → Download → Microsoft Excel (.xlsx), then ask xfa to “list the comments and notes in this file.”
  4. Reconcile. Use that list to confirm each annotation you care about made it across, and re-add any your workflow depends on.
Good habit: pull the notes-and-comments list before you convert, so you have a checklist to reconcile against afterwards.

More Google Sheets ↔ Excel problems

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