Step 2: Type the items that you want to include in the list into a column in your spreadsheet. Step 1: Open your spreadsheet in Excel 2010. This is ideally used in situations where you are looking for a specific value or type of text to occur in a cell, and you want to avoid problems that can arise when people manually enter the values themselves. The steps in the article below will result in a drop-down list that you can click to select an option. Our article continues below with more information and pictures for these steps. There are some other settings you can or should apply to the list, which we discuss below.
Our guide below will show you how to create a drop-down list in Microsoft Excel 2010. When you have a cell that can only have a few different options, such as a month, day of the week, or even a really long option that you do not want to re-type repeatedly, then a drop-down list cannot only save you time, but also help to avoid any misspellings or typos. One good way to do this is with the inclusion of drop-down lists. If you are entering data into a spreadsheet, or if you are creating a spreadsheet for others to use, then it is typically a good idea to make everything as easy as possible. You can hide the worksheet containing your lists of options to prevent them from being changed.Creating a drop down list in Excel 2010 is something that seems like it should be fairly simple, as its a helpful item to have, and there are a lot of uses for it.īut if you’ve ever tried to make a dropdown in Excel, then you may have found that it’s a little more complicated that it seems. If you have many drop-down lists you need to add on a worksheet, you may want to put the lists of options on another worksheet in the same workbook. You can use the same list for multiple drop-down lists. RELATED: How to Hide Worksheets/Tabs and Entire Workbooks in Excelįollow this process to add drop-down lists to other cells as needed. If there was an option selected when you removed the drop-down list, the cell is populated with the value of that option. Click “OK” to remove the drop-down list and restore the cell to its default format. The options on the Data Validation dialog box are reset to their defaults. If you decide you want to remove the drop-down list from the cell, open the Data Validation dialog box as described earlier and click the “Clear All” button, which is available no matter which tab is selected on the dialog box. The down arrow button only displays when the cell is selected.Ĭlick the down arrow button to drop down the list of options and select one. If you added an input message, it displays below the cell. When the cell containing the drop-down list is selected, you’ll see a down arrow button to the right of the cell. Enter a Title and an Input message and then click the “OK” button. Make sure the “Show input message when the cell is selected” box is checked. To do this, click the “Input Message” tab on the Data Validation dialog box. You can add a popup message that displays when the cell containing the drop-down list is selected. If you want to require the user to select an option from the drop-down list, uncheck the Ignore blank check box. This means that the user can select the cell and then deselect the cell without selecting an item. The “Ignore blank” check box is checked by default. Make sure the “In-cell dropdown” box is checked. Enter =Age in the “Source” box (if you named your cell range something else, replace “Age” with that name). Now, we’re going to use the name we assigned to the range of cells containing the options for our drop-down list. On the Settings tab, select “List” from the Allow drop-down list (see, drop-down lists are everywhere!). In the Data Tools section of the Data tab, click the “Data Validation” button. Now, select the cell into which you want to add a drop-down list and click the “Data” tab.