Excel Tutorial – Creating a dropdown menu

Turn on Data Validation

To create a dropdown menu in Excel:

Select one of the cells in your worksheet (for example, A1).
Open the Data tab.
Then click Data validation.

Choosing validation criteria

In the dialog box that opens, you have a dropdown menu with many options.

For instance:

Select the Whole number option.
Then, fill in a range of values between the Min and Max fields.

Press OK.
Go back to cell A1.
If you don't enter a whole number between 0 and 10, you will see the following message (here, the value entered isn't a whole number).

Error message if the value is not a whole number between 0 and 10

The error message can be customized from the Error Alert tab in the data validation dialog box.

This last option is useful because you can display informative messages without blocking input.

Change the style of the button in the Error Alert Tab

How to create a dropdown menu

As you can see, the Data validation menu controls what can be entered in a cell. A dropdown menu is based on the same principle: offering a limited choice of values.

Open the Data > Data validation dialog box.
Select the List option.
Then go to the Source text box.

There, you have two options:

You can type the values directly, separated by commas.

Or specify the data range that contains the values for the dropdown menu.

Use data range as a source for a dropdown menu

The result in your spreadsheet

Whatever method you choose (manual entry or a data range), the result is the same. The cell where you applied data validation displays a dropdown menu with the expected values listed: