Excel Tip of the Day: How to work with Lists

A List is a set of ordered labels. For example the days of the week is an example of list

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday


Excel has some built-in list:

Let's suppose that you need to list the day of the week in your spreadsheet. Since this is a built-in list, a quick way to achieve this is do to as follow
Just type the fist day in column A as in the figure

Then grab down the handle in the bottom-right corner

This is what you will get. Pretty straightforward isn't it?

The most interesting part is that Excel gives you the options to create custom Lists.
Let see how to do it
In Office 2007 you need to

• Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then Excel Options.

• Click Popular, and then under Top options for working with Excel, click Edit Custom Lists.

• In the Custom lists box, click NEW LIST, and then type the entries in the List entries box, starting with the first entry.
• Then click OK twice

Once we have build the list, we can use it as if it was a built-in one.
Type Blue in A3, grab down the fill handle and you will have the custom colour list filled in your worksheet

As a side note, if the list is lengthy, you can also import the list from cells.