What is a drop-down menu? How to add drop-down menus in Google Sheets

Using spreadsheets is undoubtedly one of the best ways to organize data, and Google Sheets is again one of the most popular and free spreadsheet programs available out there, with support for most modern features. While entering data, it is sometimes important to limit the number of inputs to just a few. At the same time, it can also happen that the one entering the data might not have an idea about the available inputs for a particular field. 

In both these cases, you can create a drop-down menu in Google Sheets. Drop-down menus are everywhere. These things are on web pages, apps, PC software, and every modern UI you can think of. I will give you a brief idea of a drop-down menu before getting started with the topic to help you understand how these menus can be helpful in Google Sheets to limit the variety of inputs to just a few.

So, without any further delay, let’s get started with how to add drop-down menus in Google Sheets, and before that, let’s have a look at, what the heck is a drop-down menu.

What is a drop-down menu?

A drop-down menu is a menu, where you can get a few options to choose from, just like any other menu. You can see the items in a drop-down menu by clicking on a small down arrow, and the list will appear just below that arrow so that you can do your selection.

Here’s a screenshot showing a drop-down menu.

Depending upon which app you are using, these drop-down menus can be plain, and sometimes look fancy, like the ones on Facebook, Instagram, and other places.

If you do not have enough space below the arrow, for the full list to appear, the list can also appear at the top, or beside the small arrow, depending upon the specific situation.

How to add drop-down menus in Google Sheets?

Now that you know what a drop-down menu is, let’s have a look at how to create a drop-down menu in Google Sheets. There are 2 different ways to add a drop-down menu in Google Sheets. So, I will talk about each of them here.

Drop-down menu from a range of cells

You can create the drop-down menu in Google Sheets from a range of cells containing the items for the menu. This is useful when you want the drop-down menu to list only those items that are already entered somewhere in the file. 

If you want to display several items in the menu, this option can be useful. Through this method, you can maintain the list in one place, and have multiple cells display the same set of items in all the similar drop-down menus.

Select the cell where the drop-down menu is supposed to be created, click on ‘Data’ in the menu bar, and then click on ‘Data validation’ from the options.

In the ‘Data validation’ dialogue that appears, click on the drop-down menu beside ‘Criteria:’, and select ‘List from a range’. Now, select the cells where the items are listed. If those cells are beyond the view, click on the small square icon as shown in the screenshot below.

Now select the set of cells containing the list of items.

Finally, click on ‘Save’.

Here’s how the list appears.

Drop-down menu from a list of items

If you want a cell to contain very few items, maybe lesst than 10 or so, or want different cells on the sheet to display different sets of items, it can be difficult to maintain different such lists in the sheet. In that situation, you can enter the list of items separated by a comma (,). To create a drop-down menu in Google Sheets of this type, select ‘List of items’ in the drop-down menu corresponding to ‘Criteria:’.

In the next text box, enter the list of items separated by a comma (,), as shown in the screenshot down below. After you are done, click on ‘Save’, as usual.

Here’s how it appears.

So, that was all about, how to add drop-down menus in Google Sheets. Besides these two ways of creating drop-down menus in Google Sheets, here are some common options that you should know.

You can reject those inputs that are not in the drop-down menu. If invalid input is done, you can either show a warning or reject the input right away. To do that, select the radio button that says ‘Show warning’ or ‘Reject input’, based on what you want, corresponding to ‘On invalid data:’.

Additionally, you can also display a help text for the data enterer to have an idea of what the cell data is all about. Mark the option that says, ‘Show validation help text;’, type in the message just below the option, and click on ‘Save’. However, this option is not working as I observed.

With the help of a drop-down menu, the integrity of the entire sheet could be maintained as the sheet designer can make it impossible for the enterer to enter any irrelevant or invalid data. This can also make data entry jobs much less time-consuming if the same input needs to be entered in multiple fields or so.

So, that was all about how to add a drop-down menu in Google Sheets. Do you have any questions in mind? Feel free to comment on the same below.