How to add drop down in Excel?

Microsoft Excel which is a part of the Microsoft Office productivity suite allows users to manage a large amount of information in a single spreadsheet. This spreadsheet contains a number of cells in which you can feed information according to your choice. Moreover, you can also create a distinction among these columns by creating rows and columns. Although, many such tools and applications come to have drop-downs present in them. But, Excel spreadsheets are devoid of this feature because here you need to create a drop-down yourself.

When you do data entry into spreadsheets manually, at that time, doing so may lead to various errors. Thankfully, there is an Excel data validation tool that lets the user reduce the inaccuracy of Excel data entry. This it does by confining the set of possible values to a pre-defined list. After the creation of drop-down lists, users can easily mark their choices instead of entering data, again and again, that too manually.

Method to create a drop-down in a cell

To create your own drop-down list you need to follow the steps given below carefully. Also, note that these steps are only applicable in Office 2016 version.

1. First of all, open the spreadsheet in which you wish to create the drop-down.
2. Here, you need to create a row or a column of the items in it for the drop-down list.
3. Further, you have to select the cell that needs a drop-down list for data validation.
4. Now, go to the Data tab and click ‘Data Validation’ from the Data Tools group.
5. When a dialog box opens, go to the Settings tab.
6. Here, you need to change three options:

• Select ‘List’ in the Allow drop-down.
• After this, specify the range of those cells of which you wish to create the drop-down e.g. D1:D7.
• Now, select the checkbox present next to ‘In-Cell Dropdown’.

7. In the end, click on the ‘OK’ option when you are done.

Conclusion-

After getting to know the answer to ‘how to add drop down in Excel’, you should know a few more things. You can also hide the range of values used in the Source box of the Data Validation dialog box. Not only this, but you can also create it on a protected sheet that you can hide as well. The users who want to create a short drop-down can avoid step number 2 in the aforementioned method. For more information on how to add drop down in Excel, you can visit the official website where there are a number of tutorials for doing anything related to Office.com/setup. The steps may slightly vary in office 2013 or Office 2010 but are almost similar.