How to Add a Drop Down List in Excel | Dropdown Menu in Excel

Dropdown list in Microsoft excel can make your tasks easier and helps layman users to work and interact with the worksheets productively. Adding a drop down menu to the excel sheet or any form can decrease the fields filling process and ultimately helps in performing the tasks in more accurate ways.

If you add a drop down menu, it will speed up your data entry capability and ultimately reduce the chances of mistakes while performing a data entry job.

In this guide, you will learn how to add a drop-down list to a cell in the Microsft Excel worksheet. Keep reading to learn about the easiest way for creating a dropdown menu or dropdown list to a spreadsheet of Excel.

The requirement for creating a dropdown list in excel is to need a list of values in cells.

First, create a list. For example, in this case (figure 1), we have listed the names of various fruits. You can enter data based on your own business questions.

How to add a drop-down list to an Excel cell

To add a dropdown menu or drop down list, look and follow the steps given below.

Enter data in any cell in our case, we have used A1 to A4 ( you can use based on your data placement)

Click on the “Data” from the top menu and click on the Data Validation icon as shown in the image below in figure 1.

figure 1

Choose ” List ” from the allow drop-down menu, choose “List,” and the formula bar will be visible now. For reference, have a look at figure 2.

figure 2

Click on the “Source” text box and drag the cursor on (A1 to A4) data. This is in our case; please choose your relevant cells from the excel workbook.

If you are not friendly with the above step, you can enter the formula =$A$1:$A$4 (include “=” in the formula)

figure 3

Once done with the formula, click on “OK” to save changes, and you will see that the drop down list is successfully enabled on your desired value. Have a look at the above image (figure 3).

Similarly, if you want to add more than a drop down list, you can do that as well. Click on the range of data you want to add in a drop-down and perform the above formula, and you will only need to change the cell addresses for each new drop down list.