Adding checkboxes in Excel makes your sheets more actionable, interactive, and also helps you convert them into a to-do list if required. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how you can add a checkbox to your Excel sheet. Let’s get started.
Also read: [Step-by-Step] How to Add Bullet Points in Excel
Steps to Add a Checkbox in Excel
Without any further ado, let’s get started on inserting a checkbox in Excel.
1. Adding Developer tab in Excel ribbon
First, we need to add the developer tab in the Excel ribbon to access the checkbox functionality. Follow the steps below to add the same:
- Right-click on any one of the tabs. Select Customize the Ribbon… from the options that appear.
- On the right side of the Excel Options dialog box, under the Customize the Ribbon: option, check the Developer option and click on OK.
- Now, the Developer tab appears as one of the tabs in the Excel ribbon. You can now access a variety of interactive controls from the Developer tab.
2. Inserting a checkbox in Excel
Let us consider a shopping list in which we want to add checkboxes to indicate that we have bought the item or not.
Follow these steps to insert a checkbox in Excel:
- Click on the Insert option in the Controls group present on the Developer tab.
- From the options that appear click on the checkbox graphic present under the Forms Control.
- Select the cell where you want to add the check box. the check box appears but it is not exactly present completely inside the cell.
- To properly position, the checkbox inside the cell, move the mouse pointer over it and drag it to the desired location as soon as the pointer transforms to a four-pointed arrow.
- To edit the checkbox text, right-click on the checkbox and select the Edit Text option from the menu that appears.
- Then delete the text Check Box 1, so that only the check box remains. The first check box is ready.
- To add checkboxes for all the items in the list, select the first cell containing the check box and drag down the fill handle present at the lower right corner of the selected cell, to the last cell where you want to copy the checkbox.
Now you can check the boxes when that thing or task is done or completed.
3. Adding strikethrough functionality
We want to strikethrough the item on the list when the checkbox is checked to indicate that the task has been completed. This can be achieved by conditional formatting. Follow these steps:
- First, we need to link each check box to a cell to indicate whether the check box is checked or not and to apply conditional formatting.
- Here, the column next to the checkboxes is added to display the status as TRUE and FALSE values for checked and unchecked boxes respectively.
- Right-click the first checkbox, select Format Control… from the options that appear.
- In the Format Control dialog box, type the reference of the cell you want to link in the Cell link text box and click on OK. Here, we have linked cell C2 with the first check box.
- We can now see that the status for the first check box displays FALSE when it is unchecked.
- Perform the above steps for every check box to link them to the cell right next to them in the Status column.
You can see that the status displays TRUE for every checked check box and FALSE for every unchecked check box. To add another functionality so that whenever a checkbox is checked a strikethrough is applied to the item corresponding to show completion, follow these steps:
- Select all the items in the Shopping list.
- Click on Conditional Formatting in the Styles group on the Home tab.
- From the options that appear click on New Rule….
- In the New Rule Formatting dialog box, select the Use a formula to determine which cells to format option under the Select a Rule Type: group.
- In the Format values where this formula is true: text box, type =C2=TRUE.
- Click on the Format button to launch the Format Cells dialog box.
- Under the Effects section in the Font tab, check the Strikethrough option and click on OK. Finally, click on OK on the New Formatting Rule dialog box.
- You can now see that strikethrough is applied to the items when the checkboxes corresponding to it are checked.
4. Remove checkboxes from worksheet
Deleting a single checkbox is easy, select the checkbox and press the delete key to remove it. Follow these steps to delete multiple checkboxes from an Excel worksheet:
- Click on Find & Select present in the Editing group on the Home tab.
- Select the Go To Special… option from the menu that appears.
- In the Go To Special dialog box, click on the Objects radio button and click OK.
- This will select all the checkboxes present in the current worksheet.
- Now simply press the delete key on your keyboard to remove all the checkboxes.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we learned how to insert a checkbox in Excel and add strikethrough functionality to it.