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How to Create Custom List in MS Excel – Guide
Excel has some features which can save your time and make you much more productive in your daily work. One of those useful (and lesser-known) feature in Excel custom lists. Before you start creating and using custom lists, let me first explain what’s so great about them. Suppose you need to put the names of the months from January to December in a column. How would you do it? And no, doing it manually is not an option.
One of the quickest ways would be to have January in one cell and February in an adjacent cell and then use the fill handle to drag the rest and let Excel automatically fill it. Excel is smart enough to recognize that you want to fill the next month in each cell where you drag the fill handle. Month names are quite generic and therefore available by default in Excel. But what if you have a list of department names and want to do the same? Instead of typing them in manually or copying and pasting them, you want them to magically appear when using the fill handle.
How to Create a custom list in Excel
You can use custom list feature to create and store lists you use often. These lists can be used as headings for columns and rows or to populate drop-down lists for faster and more accurate data entry.
Create a custom list in Windows
In the Custom Lists box, you will see the predefined lists of days of the week and months of the year.
Create a custom list on Mac
As in Windows, you will see built-in lists such as abbreviated days of the week and months of the year.
There are three ways to create your own custom list in Excel on Windows and Mac: enter your list directly, import cells from the worksheet, or import from a named range of cells.
Enter your list directly
The first way to create your own custom list is to enter it directly into the Custom Lists dialog. This is the easiest way if you have a short list not included in any of the sheets in your workbook.
You will see this list displayed in the Custom Lists box.
Import cells from a worksheet
The second way to create a custom list is to import it from cells in one of your worksheets. This method simplifies adding a custom list that you already have in workbook cells.
Import a list from a named cell range
The third way to create a custom list is to import a list from a named range of cells. This method makes it easy to add them as custom lists available in any new or existing workbook.
How to Use Autocomplete in Excel
As you saw when creating your own, Excel includes several built-in lists, including days of the week. Let’s look at a simple example to see how autocomplete works.
Type Sunday in a cell, then place your cursor over the lower-right corner of the cell until it changes to a plus sign. Drag to the right and you will see that the cells will be filled with the subsequent days of the week. Release when you are done with the cells you want to fill.
How does Excel know what to put in cells? Since the days of the week is a predefined list, you can enter any of the list items in a cell and drag it down or down to automatically fill in the rest. If you drag more than six cells to the days of the week, for example, Excel will start at the top of the list.
Once you’ve created your own custom list, you can do the same to auto-populate adjacent cells with your list items.
Examples of Excel custom lists
There are many uses for custom lists in Excel, and we can’t cover them all here. But here are just a few examples of How to use custom lists to make data entry easier and more efficient in Excel.
Final note
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