How to create a dropdown menu in excel?

[ivoiculescu2020]

Hello everyone,

Happy New Year!

Can you please guide me on which Alteryx tool to use to create a dropdown menu in a column in an Excel file?

I already created a workflow to show all the drug in our warehouses and the final report will be sent out to a list of people that will decide if they still want to keep the supplies in storage or destroy it. So the last column on the report will be called Decision and the decision maker will just select one option from the dropdown menu; for example, these would be the options to select:

Destroy

Partial destroy - specify quantity

Keep

Partial keep - specify quantity to keep

Thank you in advance!

Kind regards,

Ioana

[mceleavey]

Hi @ivoiculescu2020 ,

The short answer to this is you can't. As you will be writing to a varying range size, you won't be able to add the excel functionality to the additional rows.

The advice would be to stop using Excel (for anything), and instead use a SharePoint list for this, which would allow you to simply add the new records, as well as update the records and remove those completed from the list, so the end users would only see those they need to action. 

M.

[ivoiculescu2020]

@mceleavey 

Hello,

Many thanks for your prompt reply.

We already submitted the request to use the SharePoint lists instead (there's a different group that's in charge with this), this will take a while but in the meantime the requestor still needs to send out this report for decisions. So the back-up plan was to create a dropdown menu in the Decision column, the decision makers would select their decisions and then send us back their updated reports.

Or is there another way to create this report to offer a similar functionality?

Regards,

Ioana

[mceleavey]

Hi @ivoiculescu2020 ,

no, unless you are always writing the same amount of rows, otherwise the dropdown menu will not be available to new rows.

You can write out to a range, and the column to the right of the range can hold your dropdown. You could copy that functionality down an unlimited number of rows and suppress it if the range is empty.

This is more a question for an Excel forum. From Alteryx, you can write to a range with the new records.

The limitation of the functionality in Excel will not really allow you to do what you're trying to do.

M.

[ivoiculescu2020]

@mceleavey 

each time the workflow will be run, a new report will be generated (every 2 weeks); we will not overwrite the previously updated report(s). I know how to create a dropdown in Excel but I wanted to know if I can add such functionality through Alteryx so I don't have to manually update the report after it's generated by the workflow