Customer Notes no longer a selectable column under Orders/Screen Options

Click the ‘eye’ icon (preview). It’s in there along with all the other important shipping info.

Hi Mike,

Clicking the eye doesn’t cut it. The important point of having that column visible is that you know which orders contain a customer note.

Let me give you a real world example:

You know that approximately 10% of your orders come with customer notes. These notes must be followed because they contain special requests.

You receive 100 orders per day. 10 of these will have a note. With the customer note column visible, the order manager knows instantly which orders to manually inspect and which orders to forward to the shipping department. With 10 easy clicks, he deselects the 10 orders with a customer note, marking the 90 others for completion.

With the new layout lacking the customer notes column, the following happens. You receive 100 orders. You click on the eye symbol 100 times to check whether or not the order has a customer note. You write down which order numbers have customer notes. You then follow the rest of the steps outlined in the first example.

Based on this, is there a way to bring back the option to see the customer notes icon? Could you please explain why it has been removed? Why not keep something that is optional?

I can’t answer those questions but I hope this code will restore the functionality for you. The code can be entered in your child theme’s functions.php or you can use the “My Custom Functions” plugin.

  add_filter( 'manage_shop_order_posts_columns', 'set_shop_order_posts_columns', 99 );
  function set_shop_order_posts_columns( $columns ) {
    $columns['order_notes'] = 'Order notes';
    return $columns;
  }
  
  add_action( 'manage_shop_order_posts_custom_column' , 'show_custom_columns', 10, 2 );
  function show_custom_columns( $column_name, $post_id ) {
    switch ( $column_name ) {
      case 'order_notes':
        $order = new WC_Order( $post_id );
        $note = $order->get_customer_note();
        // choose one of the following print statements
        // print $note;
        print $note ? 'Yes' : '';
        break;
    }
  }

Code causes fatal error so cannot be applied.

i am also experiencing the same problem, needlessly wasting a lot of time!

+1 on this request, this is now forcing us to click on every “eye icon” to see if there is a delivery note for that order instead of only reading the notes on orders that have it.

@whereskarlo can you perhaps give us the correct snippet to add this function back?
Thanks in advance

I would like to have this option back too, for all the reasons @whereskarlo gives. I really hope this will come back or that @lorro can give the code that will work. Thanks ??

Just checked and the code snippet still works. Using WP 4.9.5, WC 3.3.4 & Storefront 2.2.8.

– ensure the code is inside a php opening line: <?php not 2 such or 0
– ensure you are using straight quotes and not smart quotes
– check the whole of your functions.php uncluding the snippet is valid here: https://phpcodechecker.com/
– temporarily disable other plugins to be able to rule out a plugin conflict
– please advise what theme you are using, if it is a www.remarpro.com theme I will try the code with that

@lorro it works! Thanks a lot ??

Here’s a slightly ‘improved’ version that brings back the previous mouse hover version of the order notes:

add_filter( 'manage_shop_order_posts_columns', 'woocommerce_add_order_notes_column', 99 );
function woocommerce_add_order_notes_column( $columns ) {
	$columns['order_notes'] = __('Customer note', 'woocommerce');
	return $columns;
}

add_action( 'manage_shop_order_posts_custom_column' , 'woocommerce_show_order_notes_column', 10, 2 );
function woocommerce_show_order_notes_column( $column_name, $order_id ) {
	switch ( $column_name ) {
		case 'order_notes':
			$order = wc_get_order( $order_id );
			$note = $order->get_customer_note();
			if ( !empty($note) ) {
				echo '<span class="note-on tips" data-tip="' . wc_sanitize_tooltip( $note ) . '">' . __( 'Yes', 'woocommerce' ) . '</span>';
			} else {
				echo '<span class="na">&ndash;</span>';
			}
			break;
	}
}