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January 03, 2006
Data Validation: Drop down lists
For each cell, you can define in advance what type of contents is valid for that cell. This allows you to guide users through data entry in OpenOffice.org Calc by restricting cells to receive specific values and ranges.For selected cells, a drop-down list of possible values can be defined. In this tutorial, we show how this is done.
Step1: Select the required cell and open the data validation dialog as shown below.
Step2: In the Criteria tab of the validation dialog, the Allow option is itself a drop-down list. We select List.
Step3: With List slected, a text box appears which we populate with the list of allowed values for the selected cell(s). We are almost done.
After closing the validation dialog, we see that we now must select a value for our cell from the drop-down list we have just created - as shown below. It is also acceptable to leave it blank.
This example can be downloaded here.
Posted by Dave at January 3, 2006 03:00 PM
Comments
Thanks a nice tutorial.
Posted by: Joel Graebe at January 20, 2006 08:08 PM
How can i use a list from a database server in the dropdown?
Posted by: Eduard Witteveen at February 1, 2006 09:49 AM
PERFECT! I was looking for this, even Lynda.com didn't show this for Excel; thanks!
Posted by: Chris Charlton at February 8, 2006 01:42 PM
Thanks! This was exactly what I was looking for.
Posted by: Kevin Dahlhausen at February 18, 2006 11:53 AM