How to apply drop down list to entire column
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace. Drop down lists can greatly facilitate data entry. Here's a look at how to use Microsoft Excel's data validation feature to create handy lists within your worksheets. Video: How to add a drop down list to a cell in Microsoft Excel 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. Figure A To add the drop down list in our example to an Excel sheet, do the following:
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:
SEE: 10 Excel time-savers you might not know about (free PDF) (TechRepublic) A Microsoft Excel bonus tipThis Excel tip is featured in the free PDF30 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 tipsRead 56 Excel tips every user should masterand 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 flyandhow 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. |