Add Tags in Excel

There are two substantive and one minor difference using AutoTag in Excel as opposed to using AutoTag in Microsoft Word. All of these problems revolve around one issue: Excel basically turns everything off when you are typing text in the formula bar.

Virtually all Excel menu and toolbar items are disabled when you are typing in a formula.

Insert and Edit a Tag

Because you cannot bring up the tag editor when you are editing a formula, you cannot use the position of the cursor in the formula window to determine where to insert a tag (or which tag to edit if there are multiple tags in a cell).

If a cell has just one tag, when you click Edit, it will bring up AutoTag. If a cell is empty and you click Insert Tag, it will also bring up the tag editor.

In this first example we have a cell whose content is a single tag:

When you click Tag Builder, the program needs to know if you want to insert the new tag before or after the existing tag. So you will get this prompt:

You now need to click in the pop-up window either before (and "on" counts as before) the text for the tag or after it. That tells AutoTag to insert your new tag before or after the existing tag. Click the red X to cancel the insert.

In the following screenshot, the cursor is at the end of the formula bar. Because Excel is editing the formula, most AutoTag buttons are disabled. You will also find most other Excel commands are also disabled:

And now, let's go back to inserting a tag. In this case the prompt will be as follows:

Each tag is a single unit; you cannot insert a tag in the middle of another tag. But you can select between the two tags, or, if there is text between the tags, between any two letters of the text.

Text Tags Only

Finally, Excel does not support fields, so all tags must be in the full text display format. However, AutoTag uses a macro to make text tags look like field tags.

For more information on using AutoTag with Excel's functions, see the Add Tags in Excel article.

Using AutoTag with PowerPoint

Using AutoTag in PowerPoint is essentially the same as using AutoTag in Word. The main difference is that there is no field option for tags in PowerPoint, which means that all tags will be displayed as full text.

Evaluate Tags

From the Tag Editor Dialog, you can evaluate your data selection (the select= attribute) to verify you are retrieving the correct data. The evaluate icon is in the top of the dialog.

In the case of a forEach tag, the evaluate function displays the rows of data returned.

Click the evaluate icon to evaluate the data selection. The results display in the lower right pane.