Hi,

I'm at a new job and while I am experienced with excel somewhat, I've never used drop-down lists. I'm a fast learner and I need to learn this quickly as I was asked to work on one. Can someone direct me to a tutorial or briefly explain to me how they work? Thank you!

Hi, Maureen,

Although you can enter the items that you want the dropdown list to contain in the "Data" field in the Data Validation dialogue box, in the form 1, 2, 3, 4 etc, where these are the items you want to appear in the list (having set the "Allow" field to "List", of course), I find it easier to work with named ranges of cells.

So, if the items you want to appear in the list are "Cat", "Dog" and "Mouse", enter these items somewhere in your worksheet (say a1:A3), select these cells and give them a Range name of "Animals" (Insert Name Define, enter "Animals" and press Enter).

Then, highlight the cells in your worksheet to which you want to apply the validation, and from the menu click "Data" "Validation" - set "Allow" to "List" and in thet "Data" field, enter =Animals and click "OK".

The good thing about working with range names is that if you insert a new animal into the list, the range name will be modified to include the new row and you don't have to change your validation settings - when you enter the animals manually into "Data", you'd have to keep changing it everytime you added a new animal.
Hope this helps.

Pete