How to add Comments to SharePoint Online List Items and Microsoft 365 Lists Items

In this SharePoint Online tutorial, we will discuss how to add comments to SharePoint Online list items and Microsoft lists items. Also, we will see how to enable or disable commenting in SharePoint Online list items or Microsoft 365 Lists items using SharePoint Online management shell.

We will see here how to add comments to SharePoint Online classic lists as well as in modern SharePoint Online list.

Add comments to modern SharePoint Online List Items

Now, let us see a new feature that comes in SharePoint Online lists. If you are new to modern experience, check out What is SharePoint Online Modern Experience.

Microsoft released a new feature as Comments in the SharePoint lists. Users can add comments for each item in the SharePoint Online modern list.

Note: The commenting feature is not available in SharePoint libraries.

Open any modern SharePoint list, and then you can see the comments icon or option from the command bar, ECB menu, or from the list view also.

Just hover in the list items, you can see the Comment icon. Or you can select an item and then from the command bar, you can see the Comment icon like below:

Apart from this, you can also select an item and from the ECB menu, you can click on the Comment icon like below:

Once you click on the comment icon, it will open like below, where you can add your comment and the arrow or click on Enter.

You can also add multiple comments to the SharePoint list items. But you will not have any nested commenting for the list items.

Read SharePoint Online List Forms JSON Formatting

Update Comment in SharePoint Online List Item

In the modern SharePoint online list items, there is no option to update the comments. If you want to modify, simply delete the comment and then add the comment again.

View SharePoint Online List Item Comments

We can easily view comments for each list item. But you can not add it directly as a column into the SharePoint list view.

For each item, when you hover over the Title column, you can see the comment icon will be highlighted. To view the comment, click on the Comment icon. It will also display the number of comments for each list item when you hover over the comment icon.

Once you click you can see all the comments for the particular list item.

Delete comments from SharePoint online list items

Let us see how to delete the comments from the SharePoint Online list items.

When you will click on the comment icon, it will open the commenting panel. Here hover over the comment that you want to delete, and you can see a Delete icon.

Click on the Delete icon and then it will ask for a confirmation message like the below:

Once you click on the Delete button, the comment will be deleted.

As of now, you can not delete multiple comments, you have to individually delete each comment in SharePoint.

Add comments to Microsoft Lists items

As you know Microsoft released the Microsoft Lists app, and you can create lists directly from the Lists App. If you are new to Microsoft Lists, check out the below tutorials:

• Microsoft Lists – Detailed Tutorial
• Microsoft Lists Formatting Examples
• Microsoft Lists – Create a List from Excel

The commenting functionality in Microsoft Lists is the same as the SharePoint Online lists.

You can see the comments option below when you open the Microsoft Lists list.

Like in SharePoint Online, you can view and delete comments in Microsoft lists list.

Enable commenting for SharePoint List items using PowerShell

Let us see how to enable or disable commenting in SharePoint Online lists or Microsoft lists.

There is no option to disable or enable comments at the SharePoint list level or site level. But we can use PowerShell to enable commenting at the organization level or at the Office 365 tenant level.

Make sure to install the SharePoint Online management shell. And you need to make sure, that the account you are using to run the PowerShell should be a global administrator or SharePoint administrator.

Below is the PowerShell to enable commenting for SharePoint List items using PowerShell at the tenant level.

Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com/

Set-SPOTenant -CommentsOnListItemsDisabled $false

Example:

Connect-SPOService -Url https://tsinfotechnologies-admin.sharepoint.com/

Set-SPOTenant -CommentsOnListItemsDisabled $false

Disable commenting for SharePoint List items using PowerShell

Below is the PowerShell command to disable commenting for SharePoint List items using PowerShell at the tenant level.

As I said before, we can not disable commenting in the list level or SharePoint site level. But we can disable commenting at the tenant level.

Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com/

Set-SPOTenant -CommentsOnListItemsDisabled $true

Example:

Connect-SPOService -Url https://tsinfotechnologies-admin.sharepoint.com/

Set-SPOTenant -CommentsOnListItemsDisabled $true

This is how we can disable commenting in Office 365 tenant level that you can run using PowerShell ISE.

Add comments to classic SharePoint Online List Items

If you are still using the SharePoint Online classic team site, follow the below approach to add comments to SharePoint list items.

The new modern commenting feature is not available on the classic SharePoint site.

Open the SharePoint list for which you want to add the commenting functionality. Then add multi lines of text columns.

Then in the Additional Column Settings, go to the Append Changes to Existing Text and select Yes.

Once you click on Save, the column will be created.

Now, when you will add an item, you can see the View Entries for the multiline column.

When you click on View Entries, you can see the columns. All your previous comments will appear below and the new comments will be appended to the existing comments in the SharePoint list items.

This is how we can add comments to SharePoint Online classic list items.

Video tutorial on SharePoint Online modern list commenting functionality

I have also created a video tutorial on SharePoint Online modern list commenting functionality. Check out below and also subscribe to our YouTube channel.

You can also check out the following tutorials:

• SharePoint Online communication site
• SharePoint Online regional settings
• Convert classic SharePoint site to modern communication site using PowerShell
• SharePoint site columns
• Create SharePoint Subsite + Programmatically and PowerShell
• Delete SharePoint Site + PowerShell
• SharePoint Customization – Complete Guide
• How to export SharePoint List items to excel using Power Automate and send email

In this SharePoint tutorial, we learned commenting functionality in SharePoint list items and the below things:

• Add comments to modern SharePoint Online List Items
• Update Comment in SharePoint Online List Item
• View SharePoint Online List Item Comments
• Delete comments from SharePoint online list items
• Add comments to Microsoft Lists items
• Enable commenting for SharePoint List items using PowerShell
• Disable commenting for SharePoint List items using PowerShell
• Add comments to classic SharePoint Online List Items
• Video tutorial on SharePoint Online modern list commenting functionality