Create a drop-down list in Excel in 3 minutes!

 Creating a drop-down menu in Excel may look difficult, but it’s actually super easy! It won’t take you more than 3 minutes the first time you do it, and when you get the hang of it, it only takes a few seconds!

Just follow these 3 steps to create a drop-down list in Excel:

1. Create a list of the items that you want to appear in the drop-down menu.


2. Name the list.

Select the range and press Ctrl+Shift+F3 to open the name manager. If the list has a headline (it should!), choose Top row.








3. Create the drop-down menu.

Now you can create a drop-down menu anywhere you want in the workbook. Select a cell and press Alt, then D, then L to open the Data Validation window. Choose List in the first field.

In the source field, simply press F3 to retrieve your list names and choose the one you want for this drop-down.








Done!














Note: If you want to create many drop-down menus in one workbook, it might be a good idea to create all the lists in one tab.

Popular posts from this blog

SUM across multiple sheets in Excel

Image
If you have a report in Excel with multiple identical sheets, for example one sheet per month, that you want to add together in a separate sheet, there are a few different ways to do it. The most common way is to simply type an equal sign, click on B2 in the ‘Jan’ sheet, type a plus sign, click on B2 in the ‘Feb’ sheet, and so on. Then copy down and across. This takes a long time, and it’s easy to make mistakes when you write formulas like that. A better way to do it is to use this formula: =SUM(Jan:Dec!B2) (and copy down and across) With this formula, Excel looks at all the tabs from Jan through Dec and picks up the value in B2 in all of them. Note that you only need an exclamation mark after the second sheet reference. You have to be careful when you use this approach, though. If you insert or move another sheet between the ones you want to refer to in the formula, Excel assumes that you want to include that too. On the picture below you can see what might happen if you move a phone ...
Read more