Microsoft Excel Tutorial - How to Create a List

A Microsoft Excel list is nothing more than a drop-down menu that is automatically created for each column. This drop-down menu is above the first row for each column and offers different options and operations that can be performed for its column. This tutorial will show how to create one of these automatic drop-down menus for each column, called a List.

1. Open Excel & Create New Workbook

You could use a pre-existing Excel workbook, but for this example, I will create a new Excel file and add the Excel list from scratch.

2. Sample data

For this example, I will use sample data similar to a previous example. I will fill cells A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, and A8 with the values "Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", and "Saturday" respectively. Next, in the Excel worksheet, fill cells B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, B7, and B8 with the values 77, 76, 74, 79, 70, 75, and 78, representing the temperature. That is all you will need for the sample data.

3. Highlight Data

Click and drag the mouse over cells A2 through B8 to highlight all 14 cells. Alternatively, you could use the keyboard by holding down the shift key while pressing the arrow keys to highlight and select a rectangle of cells.

4. Click Data -> List -> Create List

In the window called "Create List", it will already have the range filled in because you highlighted the 14 rows from step 3. If you had decided to make headers for each column like "Day" and "Temperature", you can check mark "My list has headers" and the Excel list that gets created will account for the header cells and not count them as data. For our example, we do not have headers, so you can leave that un-checked. Click OK.

You will notice now that all of your data was moved down 1 row and cell A2 says "Column1" and cell B2 says "Column2". You can click on those cells to change that text for your list.

If you click on the arrow, it will show a dropdown with options for sorting, all, top 10, custom, or individual values from the column. Notice that this is the behavior of a list. You can select any of the values from the drop-down (Excel list) and it will show you the data for that entry in the list, including the value for that row in all the other columns that are included in your list.

This can be really helpful if you are analyzing data in the worksheet. You can perform many options if your turn that data into an Excel list as was shown in this tutorial. You can single out certain ranges or rows depending on certain criteria. I would suggest clicking on the "Custom..." from the dropdown as that has many options to manipulate the list and show the data just like you want it from your Microsoft Excel list.