Google Sheets will let you leave a thousand comments and then give you no way to read them as a thousand comments. This is a single page that fixes that, and the best thing on it is the list of things it admits it can’t do.

The problem is real and slightly maddening. A spreadsheet accumulates comment threads over weeks — a question on a cell here, a resolved objection there, three people arguing in a reply chain — and Sheets keeps every one of them pinned to the cell it came from. There is no view that lists them, sorts them by person or date, counts them, or hands the set to someone who needs it. The comments are in the file; they’re just not reachable as a set.

CommentPulse takes the long way round and it works. Open the sheet, File → Download → Microsoft Excel, and drop the .xlsx on the page. An .xlsx is a zip archive, so the page unzips it and reads the comment parts out of it, and every thread comes back in order with the tab it lives on, the cell it’s attached to, its replies, and whether it was resolved. Filter by tab, by person, by open-or-resolved; sort by position or by newest activity; search the text. Export the result as CSV or copy it as Markdown. You can drop several workbooks at once, and there’s an example loaded with invented data so you can see the shape of the output before you commit a real file.

None of it leaves the machine. There is no account, no sign-in and no server — the file is read by the page, in the tab, and closing the tab ends it. The source is on GitHub under MIT, with a test suite you can run from the page. There’s also a Sheets add-on now that does the same job without the download step, dropping the comments into a tab of the spreadsheet you’re already in.

What makes it worth writing about is a section called “What this cannot tell you”. Unprompted, near the bottom, the page lists the four things the export doesn’t carry: when a thread was resolved and by whom, deleted comments, emoji reactions, and email addresses. It goes further and explains the consequence — the export stores resolution as a yes or no and nothing else, so those columns are absent rather than blank. Times are shown in your local zone; the CSV exports UTC.

Limitations, stated plainly: spreadsheets only. Docs and Slides aren’t supported yet, and it wants the Excel export rather than the file itself. Excel workbooks work too.