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During the next few days, weeks, and months – I will be writing about the new and cool features of this new version of Office. For now I invite you to go and take a test drive of the upcoming Office version.

Download the beta now at: http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx

Real World Office: Changing the Choices in an In-Cell Drop Down

The Challenge
A colleague of mine created a form out of a Microsoft Excel worksheet, there are two in-cell dropdown lists (from Data Validation) – what she wants to happen is that the choices in the second data validation list changes depending on what the user selects on the first data validation list.
For example if a user chooses Fruits in the first in-cell dropdown, then the second in-cell dropdown should contain Apples, Oranges, Grapes, etc.. If the user then chooses Vegetables, then the second should contain Broccoli, Carrots, etc.

The Solution
The first thing that came into our minds is that we probably need a macro to do this (Yikes!).
Since the in-cell drop down lists are created using Data Validation and we know that the validation criteria (the contents of the in-cell drop down, in this case) can be determined by using a formula then you can use the IF function (nested in this case – depending on the number of items in the first cell) to determine which choices to display.

The logic goes something like this:

1. IF user chooses "Fruits" then user can choose between "Apples", "Oranges", and "Grapes"
2. IF user chooses "Vegetables" then the user can choose between "Carrots", "Cabbage", "Broccoli"

Step 1 – Tabulate the choices in a separate sheet in your workbook, should look something like this:


Step 2 – Go back to the second in-cell drop down, go to the Data tab in the ribbon then click data validation. Under the Validation criteria group, make sure that List is selected for the "Allow" field – then in the source field create a formula using the IF function.

The formula should look like this:

=IF([Cell Reference for the First Cell]="[Choice]",[Cell Reference for the Choices], IF([Cell Reference for the First Cell]="[Choice]",[Cell Reference for the Choices]…))

For this example the formula looks something like this:

=IF(C3="Fruits",Sheet2!$B$3:$B$5,IF(C3="Vegetables",Sheet2!$C$3:$C$5,FALSE))

Result
The choices in the second in-cell dropdown list now changes depending on the value of the first cell.
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Hello and Welcome!

It has been a couple of months since I graduated from college – a time where I traded homework with reports, school presentations with presentations over LiveMeeting and another bunch of school stuff for work stuff. The past few months have been fun so far – I am really learning a lot of new things related to my role and every day I am finding more ways on how Microsoft Office can help me do things faster and smarter.



Welcome to My Office Notes, it is where I will write about tips and tricks that are really worth sharing –tricks that you never have thought to be possible with Microsoft Office, questions that my colleagues are asking me every single day, and productivity challenges that I even personally face sometimes.

If you are an avid reader of StudentEmpowered on Microsoft Philippines Community Forums – this is the place where we can continue our conversations about how to be more productive in school, or at work.
I hope you enjoy reading and learning from my new blog!

Cheers!

Chester Coronel