Picking data from a list

It would seem like entering data into an Excel worksheet is the easiest thing you can do, and in many ways it is. The problem is, we are human and humans make mistakes. In this movie, I will show you a way to enter data into a cell reliably, as long as that data occurs in the column that you're entering the new value into. I will use the PickFromList sample file, which you can find in the Chapter 5 folder of your Exercise Files archive. This worksheet contains a series of data for quarters and department for a particular company.

So you can see that we have the departments of Balance, Dance, Play, Sport, and Work. Those are the different areas that the company focuses on. Now it's the time to enter data for quarter number 2. I want to enter in a value for the Balance department, but I don't want to retype it for fear of possibly making an error. If I want to enter a value into cell B9 that already occurs in column B, I can right-click cell B9, and then from the context menu that appears, click Pick From Drop-down List. Doing so displays a list of all the values that occur in column B--Balance, Dance, Play, Sport, and Work--but notice that Department doesn't occur, and I think that's because it's formatted differently from the other values.

But in any case, the value that I want does appear there, so that's Balance. I'll click it and it appears inside of cell B9. So that is a very quick way to enter data reliably. You won't make any misspellings, or if it was misspelled, the first time, at least of misspellings will be consistent and you can do a find and replace or a spell-check later.