Have you ever encountered a situation where you are building the template in Microsoft Excel and it will be useful to have the drop-down box? It will help the users to select the preset list instead of simply typing the values. Interesting thing is that Microsoft Excel gives you the option to create your own drop-down box in the application. Do you know how to how to add drop-down list in excel?
Excel is a wonderful tool in taking data and has the ability to turn the data into useful information. Excel has the options to sort your data in different ways. It can be a very powerful tool to perform visual data analyzing on the data.
How to add drop-down list in excel
- Select cells that you choose to contain lists.
- In ribbon, click on DATA > Data Validation.
- On the dialog, set Allow to List.
- Click in the Source, type text or numbers (separated with commas) that you want in the drop-down list, and click on OK.
Drop-down lists can be a great help in the data entry. Here, we will discuss how you can employ Microsoft Excel’s data validation feature to create drop-down lists in the worksheets.
The Excel drop-down menu or Excel drop-down list will make things easier for normal Microsoft Excel user to put data in a worksheet. Using the drop-down menu in the web forms, polls or surveys would limit the entry of choices for the selected cell, expediting the data entry and will reduce the data entry error. Here we can show you how you can easily create the drop-down list spreadsheet application’s Data Validation features.
Data validation is the feature that is offered by Microsoft Excel that is used to restrict the user while entering into the cell. For instance, you can use a value between 1 & 6, making sure the data occurs in next 30 days or making sure the text entry below 25.
- Type the entries in a new worksheet that would appear in the drop-down list. There are list of items in the Excel table. If you don’t have that, you can convert the list in a table by selecting the cell from the range and click on Ctrl+T.
- Select the cell in worksheet where you want your drop-down list.
- Go to Data tab on Ribbon, next Data Validation.
- On Settings tab, in Allow box, click on List.
- Click in Source box, next select the list range.
- If it’s OK for user to leave cell empty, check on Ignore blank box.
- Check In-cell drop-down menu box.
- Click on the Input Message tab.
- Click on the Error Alert tab ( if the message is to pop up when somebody enters something that in the list or invalid data)
- If you’re not sure which option to pick in style box?
Creating drop-down box in a worksheet will help the people in picking up an item from the list that you have already created.