This is a video tutorial on how to use drop down in MS Excel. How to do drop down selection list in MS Excel is one of the most commonly used MS Excel functions. It adds an additional choice into the existing choices. Drop down can be applied to any list based data with the help of MS Excel.
drop down, using the excel toolbars, is very easy and can be used to filter data or set font size for text that you do not want users to edit. The drop down feature makes it easier for website owners and system users in the workplace to make decisions in a fast and efficient manner. This process takes less time and effort in Excel 2010 and in subsequent versions of this spreadsheet application.
An Excel drop down list or dropdown menu can make it easier for the average Microsoft Excel user to enter data on a worksheet or workbook. Using a drop down menu in web forms, surveys, or polls can limit the entry choices for a selected cell, speeding data entry and reducing data entry error. In this Excel tip, we’ll show you a quick and easy way to create a dropdown list or drop down menu using the spreadsheet application’s Data Validation feature.
To create a drop down list in Excel, you need two things: A list of values (contained within a cell range) and a blank cell to use as the data entry cell.
Figure A shows a simple drop down list in an Excel sheet. To use the drop down menu shown here, someone would place the cursor over the blank, data-entry cell (E4 in this example) and click a drop down arrow to display the list of values shown in the cell range A1:A4. If a user tries to enter something that isn’t an item within that list of values, Excel rejects the entry.
You can follow along with the steps in this tip by creating a new sheet with data similar to the one shown in Figure A, downloading our demonstration .xlsx and .xls files, or using your own worksheet and data.
To add the drop down list in our example to an Excel sheet, do the following:
- Create the data validation list in cells A1:A4. Similarly, you can enter the items in a single row, such as A1:D1.
- Select cell E4. (You can position the drop down list in most any cell or even multiple cells.)
- Choose Data Validation from the Data ribbon menu.
- Choose List from the Allow option’s drop down list. (See, they’re everywhere.)
- Click the Source control box and drag the cursor to highlight the cells A1:A4. Alternately, simply enter the reference (=$A$1:$A$4).
- Make sure the In-cell dropdown option is checked. If you uncheck this option, Excel still forces users to enter only list values (A1:A4), but it won’t present a drop down list.
- Click OK.
SEE: How to create a drop-down list in Google Sheets (TechRepublic)
You can add the drop down list to multiple Excel cells. Select the range of data input cells (step 2) instead of a single Excel cell. It even works for noncontiguous Excel cells. Hold down the Shift key while you click the appropriate Excel cells.
A few quick notes:
- You can only see the drop down box if you click on the Excel cell used for data entry.
- Your users can now only choose one of the options in the drop down. If they try to enter their own data, then they’ll receive an error message.
- You can copy-and-paste this drop down cell to any other Excel cells in your spreadsheet, and you can create as many different drop downs like this as you’d like.
SEE: 10 Excel time-savers you might not know about (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
A Microsoft Excel bonus tip
This Excel tip is featured in the free PDF 30 things you should never do in Microsoft Office.
Rely on multiple links
Links between two Excel workbooks are common and useful. But multiple links where values in workbook1 depend on values in workbook2, which links to workbook3, and so on, are hard to manage and unstable. Users forget to close files, and sometimes they even move them. If you’re the only person working with those linked Excel workbooks, you might not run into trouble, but if other users are reviewing and modifying them, you’re asking for trouble. If you truly need that much linking, you might consider a new design.
Get more Excel tips
Read 56 Excel tips every user should master and the tutorials on how to add a condition to a drop down list in Excel, how to add color to a drop down list in Excel, how to create an Excel drop down list from another tab, how to change an Excel conditional formatting on the fly and how to combine Excel’s VLOOKUP() function with a combo box for enhanced searching. Also, check out this free PDF download: 13 handy Excel data entry shortcuts.
Conclusions
Have you ever wished that a drop down box would appear in your Excel Spreadsheet? There are a couple different ways to do that, and it can be a very useful tool for gathering information from a large group of people. In this article, I will go over two different ways to make a drop down box.