How to add a dropdown list to Outlook email template

Add dropdown or combo box control to Outlook message

Though it is not possible to create a dropdown box directly in an email message, nothing prevents you from creating it in Word, and then simply copying to Outlook. Because Word is generally used as Outlook's email editor, the copied dropdown will retain all its functionality.

Insert dropdown in Outlook email template

In this example, a drop-down list that we create will be displayed on a small form. And the value you pick from the list will be automatically placed into the appropriate part of the message.

Please don't feel intimidated - there will be no VBA and no custom forms. All we need is Shared Email Templates. If you don't have this add-in in your Outlook, you can quickly download a free version from Microsoft AppSource, and then follow the below steps.

To add a dropdown to your Outlook template, this is what you need to do:

1. In the template editor, place the cursor where a selected value should appear and click the Insert Macro button.
2. In the list of macros, choose WhatToEnter.
3. Configure your list in this way:
   • In the first box, choose Dropdown list.
   • For Windows title, type some descriptive prompt, e.g. Select a city.
   • In the Items box, enter the items one per line.

   When done, click Insert.

4. A properly configured macro is embedded in your template like shown in the screenshot below, and you click Save to keep the changes. Done!

Create multiple selection dropdown with checkboxes

As you know, a classic drop-down allows selecting just one value - when you pick another item, it replaces the current selection. But what if you wish to insert several values from the same dropdown into the same message? A multi-select dropdown with checkboxes is the thing you need. And Shared Email Templates makes it possible too!

To add a multi-select dropdown to your message template, use the WhatToEnter macro as described in the previous example. And then, enable the User can select multiple items option and specify the delimiter to separate the items. That's all there is to it!

Depending on the template text, the delimiter could be a comma, space, comma and space, or some word. In our example, it's the conjunction or surrounded by spaces, i.e. " or ".

Optionally, you can also allow the user to edit the selected items.

In the image below, the What to Enter settings on the right demonstrate how to configure an editable multi-select dropdown, and the highlighted placeholder on the left shows the desired outcome:

Clicking the Insert button replaces the placeholder with the following macro:

~%WhatToEnter[Chandler;Denver;Hartford;Little Rock;Phoenix;{title:"Select one or more cities", multiselect, editable, delimiter:" or "}]

And it lets you select as many values as you like:

Also, it shows exactly how your section will appear in the email. If something is wrong, you can make corrections directly in this box, e.g. type a different delimiter for this particular message:

Clicking OK pastes the template's text with all the selected items into an email like shown below:

Populate dropdown list from Excel table

In many situations, "hard-coded" items work just fine. However, when your list continuously changes, such an approach would be a needless waste of time because you'll have to update your template manually with every change. In this case, a far better solution would be to dynamically populate a drop-down list with values from a database. It is especially useful when your template contains several related variables like in this example:

Depending on which city is selected in the dropdown list, the corresponding phone number and email address should be fetched from the database and inserted into a message. Is that even possible? With Shared Email Templates, yes, it is :) Here's how:

1. First off, create a dataset in Shared Email Templates or connect to an Excel table or import from a .txt or .csv file. For this example, I've imported the following table from Excel and named my new dataset Regional Offices:

   It is important that the leftmost column in the dataset is always the key column - it is these values that will appear in the dropdown (cities in our case).

2. In the template editor, place the cursor where you want to plug a value from the dataset, click Insert Macro, and select WhatToEnter.
3. Set up your dropdown list as follows:
   • In the first box, choose Dataset.
   • In the Windows title box, type something that will help you understand what kind of value you are to select.
   • Choose the Dataset where to look for the data.
   • Pick the Target column to fetch the value from.
   

   Clicking the Insert button will replace the <city> placeholder with the following code:

   ~%WhatToEnter[{dataset:"Regional offices", column:"City", title:"Select a city"}]

4. In a similar fashion, we configure 2 more macros for the <phone> and <email> variables. The difference is only in the Target column, which is Phone and Email, respectively.

Eventually, our finalized email template takes the following look:

When using this template, you are only requested to select a city:

All the related data will be pulled from the dataset and pasted into the message automatically!

The real beauty of this method is when the source data changes, you only need to make changes in one place (the dataset), without having to update every template that uses that data.

How to quickly edit a dropdown list in email template

To update an existing list, there's no need to recreate the macro from scratch - you can easily edit the macro's code itself. The below visual explains what each part of the code does:

1. Items - are listed within square brackets and separated by semicolons. You are free to delete or change the existing values as well as type new ones.
2. Title - can also be changed.
3. Multiselect - allows selecting multiple items.
4. Editable - allows changing the selected values or entering a value that isn't in the list (combo box behavior). To only allow picking the predefined values (drop-down list behavior), delete "editable".
5. Delimiter - one or more characters that separate the items in case of a multi-select dropdown.

Adding dropdown menus is just one of many unique features available with Shared Email Templates. After experimenting a bit, you will discover that there is almost nothing you cannot do. If there is such a thing, please let us know here in comments :)

Available downloads

Shared Email Templates presentation (.pdf file)