Best Tech Articles How to Insert a Checkbox in Excel

Tips&Tricks

Apr 21, 2016 608 Views 05 Comment 1.5k Share

Inserting a checkbox in Excel is an easy task, the checkbox control is available in the Excel developer tools option. Checkbox and other controls like drop downs can be quite helpful while designing forms in Excel.

These controls prevent users from entering some unwanted data in your forms and hence they are preferred to traditional textboxes.

Today in this post, I will be guiding you on how to insert a checkbox in Excel. After that we will also see an example of how checkboxes can ease the data analysis tasks.

How to add a Checkbox in Excel:

As I have foretold that checkbox control is present in the Excel developer tools. But this developer tools option is absent in the Excel ribbon by default. So first of all, we need to make this option available in the Excel top ribbon and after that we can use the checkbox control. Below is a step by step procedure for adding a checkbox to Excel:

With an Excel sheet opened, navigate to File > Options > Customize Ribbon tab.

Now choose “Developer” from the left pane, add it to the “All Tabs” pane on right side and click the “OK” button.

After this you will be able to see a “Developer” tab on your excel ribbon. Inside the “Developer” tab click on the “Insert” dropdown and select the “Checkbox” control as shown.

Now, you can draw a checkbox anywhere on your excel sheet.
Next, you can customize your “checkbox” using the “Format Control” option.
In the ‘Format Control’ window you can choose the default check or default uncheck type of checkbox. In the ‘Cell link’, select the cell in your datasheet where you want to show the check/uncheck status of checkbox. The check/uncheck status of checkbox is represented by ‘True/False’ respectively.