We think this user is asking the wrong question, but they are onto something important. The instinct to track *when* work gets done is smart. The method of hovering over a cell to reveal a hidden date is a workaround that shows how badly traditional spreadsheets fail at this simple task. What they really need is not a better way to peek at a cell's history, but a spreadsheet that remembers that history for them automatically.
Consider the manual burden here. Every time you type "DONE" into a cell, you are generating useful data that currently evaporates. To preserve it, you have to add another column, another cell, another manual entry of today's date. That is not just extra work; it is a distraction from the actual project work you are trying to track. The user's proposed solution, hovering to see the last edit date for a keyword, would be a marginal improvement, but it still treats the date as a hidden artifact rather than a first-class piece of data. You would still need to remember to check it, and you would still lose the ability to sort, filter, or analyze when things actually got marked complete.
An AI-native spreadsheet would solve this differently. Instead of asking you to log dates, it would watch the cell's content change. When it sees "DONE" appear, it captures the timestamp automatically, no extra column, no extra click, no hover trick. That date becomes a property of the cell itself, available for summaries, charts, or conditional formatting without any additional data entry. The real transformation is not in how you *view* the date, but in how you *never have to enter it* in the first place. The spreadsheet becomes proactive, not passive.
This is the practical shift worth exploring. If you are building a project tracker and find yourself adding extra cells just to record dates, you have hit the limit of what manual spreadsheets can do for you. The answer is not a clever workaround; it is a tool that treats your workflow as data, not as something you must constantly document. Stop asking how to reveal a hidden date. Start asking how to make the date appear without your involvement. That is the path from tracking to automation.