How is dropdown useful in Excel?

Excel is unarguably one of the best data entry software and the most widely used across the fields and by a wide range of people some of whom are excel experts.

From a user perspective, when I’m entering a number of rows of data, it’s difficult for me to type the text in a particular column every time I create a new row. Let’s say I am entering the transactions happening in a vegetable stall. Then I need to type the name of the vegetable every time a transaction happens, number of Kilograms the customer took, the amount he/she paid etc. And when I’m analyzing at the end of the month to understand the sales of each vegetable, I will have to add new vegetables to the dictionary,

• Tomoto
• Tamoto
• Tamato
• Tomat etc.

I don’t make these mistakes because I don’t know how to write a simple word “Tomato”; but while entering loads of data I tend to make small mistakes, which will trouble me a lot at the end. So, a dropdown is inarguably one of the most useful data entry elements in Excel. Excel consultants can do it.

How to create a dropdown list in Excel?

There are multiple ways in which you can create a dropdown list in Excel.

1. Data Validation
2. Form Control (Combo Box)
3. ActiveX Control (Combo Box)

But of these methods, Data Validation is the most used method, for its simplicity. Later on, I’ll explain the pros and cons of each method, so that you can choose the best method among these for you.

Creating a dropdown list in Excel through Data Validation

Before going to explain how to create a dropdown list, let me tell you what a Data Validation is? It controls the type of data or the values that users enter into acell. For example, you may want to enter only positive values in a cell, only ‘time’ in a column, or a text below the specified length. You can define all these conditions through Data Validation. Even dropdown list is a data validation where you’re constraining the user to use only those set of words in that cell. Again, in creating a dropdown list through data validation, there are different ways in doing it. Here are those. Hire Chaitanya Sagar online at www.p2w2.com/chaitanya_sagar