General Question

2davidc8's avatar

Excel experts: how do I make this kind of a dropdown list (details inside)?

Asked by 2davidc8 (10189points) July 30th, 2021
9 responses
“Great Question” (0points)

Have you been on websites where you are entering your address and you can select your state by typing just the first letter of one of the states?
For example, if you type “c”, “California” is automatically selected and all you have to do is hit enter or tab out of it. If you type “co”, then “Colorado” is selected, etc.
This would make data entry go a lot faster.
How can I do this in Excel without having to learn a programming language and without VBA?

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Answers

Forever_Free's avatar

while in Excel, hit F1 key. Type in drop down.

This is the MS help function to get you there

2davidc8's avatar

No, the solution to this problem is not there.
This is a tricky requirement, beyond a basic dropdown list.

Forever_Free's avatar

unfortunately you will have to do a bit of work for this quick selectfeature.

see youtube instructions

2davidc8's avatar

Thanks for the link to the YT vid. Seems worth a try. The programming is not too complicated.

elbanditoroso's avatar

Easy peasy: link

Forever_Free's avatar

@2davidc8 I would be interested if you get it working

KRD's avatar

Some sites I visit have that.

2davidc8's avatar

@elbanditoroso Unfortunately, that doesn’t work the way I want. It just makes a basic dropdown list. If you tab into the cell, and you are making a particular selection for the first time, you have to type the entire word.

2davidc8's avatar

@Forever_Free The video used Excel 2009, so I had to do some “interpreting”. Eventually figured it out, but it was not quite what I was looking for, either. The instructor made it such that you could make a dropdown list pop up any time you wanted to select an entry from that list (in other words, a kind of floating dropdown list). To trigger it, you had to hit Ctrl L.
I think that the general idea is interesting, though, and I might be able to tweak the code and get it closer to what I want, but it will take a bit more work. Don’t know if I have the inclination at this pointl
But thanks for your suggestion.

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