Excel General Ledger Part 3: Dropdown boxes

Utilising the data validation tool in excel, we can create dropdown boxes for our ledger. This can save time keying manually and increases accuracy.


1
Create a new sheet, name it "chartOfAccounts"


2
Populate the sheet with account names

3
Go back to your ledger sheet.

And select the accounts column.

4
Click on Data > Data Tools > Data Validation


5
Change the fields as follows:
Allow: List
Source: =chartOfAccounts!A:A

6
You might want to disable error alert by clicking on Error Alert and unchecking "Show error alert after invalid data is entered"


7
Now you can select any cell in the account column and a dropdown box will appear.

8
You can also do something similar for the date column to save time entering today's date.

Simply by creating a new sheet with the formula "=now()" and using data validation steps above.