by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on
This tutorial will guide you on how to make a checkbox in Excel and use the check box results in formulas to create an interactive checklist, to-do list, report or graph.
I believe everybody knows what a checkbox is, you must have seen plenty of them on various forms online. Still, for the sake of clarity, let me begin with a brief definition.
A check box, also referred to as a tick box or checkmark box or selection box, is a little square box where you click to select or deselect a given option.
Inserting a checkbox in Excel sounds like a trivial thing, but it opens up a host of new possibilities for your worksheets that will keep you on track with your goals, schedule, assignments, etc.
Like all other Form controls, the Check Box control resides on the Developer tab, which does not appear on the Excel ribbon by default. So, you need to turn it on first.
To add the Developer tab to the Excel ribbon, do the following:
Now, with the Developer tab in place, you get access to a host of interactive controls, including Check Box.
If you are creating an Excel checklist or to-do list, the first step is to make a list of tasks or other items for which the check boxes will be inserted.
For this example, I've created the following Party Planning Checklist:
The preparation steps are completed, and now we are getting to the main part - add checkboxes to our Party Planning list.
To insert a checkbox in Excel, execute these steps:
Your first Excel checkbox is ready, and you just have to copy it to other cells.
Select the cell with the check box by using the arrow keys on your keyboard, and position the cursor over the lower right corner of the cell. When the mouse pointer changes to a thin black cross, drag it down to the last cell where you want to copy the checkbox.
Done! The check boxes are added to all the items in the checklist:
As you can see in the screenshot above, our Excel checklist is almost ready. Why almost? Although the checkboxes are inserted and you can now check or uncheck them by simply clicking on a box, Microsoft Excel is not able to respond to these changes because no cell is linked to any of the checkboxes yet.
The next part of our Excel Checkbox tutorial will teach you how to capture the user selecting or clearing a checkbox and how to use that information in your formulas.
As already mentioned, to be able to capture the checkbox state (checked or unchecked) you need to associate the check box with a certain cell. To do this, please follow these steps:
Tip. To easily identify the linked cells, select them in an adjacent column that does not contain any other data. This way, you will be able to safely hide the linked cells later so they won't clutter your worksheet.
At this point, the linked cells probably don't make much sense, but please bear with me just a little longer and you will see how many new opportunities they provide to you.
Below you will find a few examples of how to use checkboxes in Excel to make an interactive checklist, to-do list, report and chart. But first, let's learn how to link checkboxes to cells. The technique is very simple, but it's the corner stone of using the checkbox results in your formulas.
Tip. To quickly get a selection of checklist templates for Excel, click File > New, type "checklist" in the search box, and press Enter.
In fact, we have already done the major part of the job by adding check boxes and linking them to cells. Now, we will just write a few formulas to create a data summary for our Excel checklist.
It's the easiest one - use the COUNTA function to get the number of non-blank cells in the checklist:
=COUNTA(A2:A12)
Where A2:A12 are the checklist items.
A completed task means a checkbox with a tick symbol in it, which means the TRUE value in a linked cell. So, get the total count of TRUE's with this COUNTIF formula:
=COUNTIF(C2:C12,TRUE)
Where C2:C12 are the linked cells.
To make a formula a bit more clever, you use COUNTIFS instead of COUNTIF to check for blank cells in the list (column A):
=COUNTIFS(A2:A12, "<>", C2:C12, TRUE)
In this case, if you delete some irrelevant item(s) from your Excel checklist, but forget to remove a check symbol from the corresponding box, such checkmarks won't be counted.
To calculate the presented of the tasks completed, use the regular percentage formula:
Part/Total = Percentage
In our case, divide the number of completed tasks by the total number of tasks, like this:
=COUNTIF(C2:C12,TRUE)/COUNTA(A2:A12)
The following screenshot demonstrates all of the above formulas in action:
As you can see in the screenshot above, we have inserted one more formula in B18. The formula is based on the IF function that returns "Yes" if the number of completed tasks is equal to the tasks total, "No" otherwise:
=IF(B14=B15, "Yep!", "Nope :(")
To embellish your checklist a bit further, you can create a couple of conditional formatting rules that will change the color of cell B18 depending on its value.
Once that's completed, hide the column with linked cells, and your Excel checklist is done!
If you like the checklist we've created for this example, you are welcome to download it now.
Basically, you can add checkboxes and formulas for a to-do list exactly in the same way as we have just done for the Excel checklist. "What's the point of writing this section then?" you can ask me. Well, in a typical to-do list, the completed tasks have the strikethrough format like this:
This effect can be easily achieved by creating a conditional formatting rule. The detailed steps follow below.
To begin with, write down a list of tasks, insert checkboxes and link them to cells:
And now, apply conditional formatting that will give the strikethrough format and, optionally, a different background or font color to the checked items.
=$C2=TRUE
Where C2 is the top-most linked cell.
Tip. If you have little experience with conditional formatting, you may find the following detailed guidance helpful: Excel conditional formatting based on another cell value.
As of now, whenever a certain box is checked, the corresponding item gets formatted in the light grey font color with a strikethrough.
And here's one more idea for formatting your Excel to-do list. Instead of crossing out the competed tasks, you can insert an additional column with the following IF formula:
=IF(E2=TRUE, "Done", "To Be Done")
Where E2 is the top-most linked cell.
As shown in the screenshot below, the formula returns "Done" if a linked cell contains TRUE, "To be done" if FALSE:
After that, apply the desired conditional format to the Status column based on this formula:
=$C2="Done"
The result will look something similar to this:
Lastly, add a couple of formulas to calculate the completed tasks (like we did for the checklist), hide the linked cells, and your Excel To Do list is good to go!
The bar chart at the top of the To-Do list is based on the percentage formula in B2. If you are curious to know the details, I encourage you to download the template, unhide columns D and E, and investigate the formulas.
Another useful application of checkboxes in Excel is for creating interactive reports.
Supposing you have a sales report that includes data for 4 regions: North, South, East and West. Your aim is to get the total for one or more selected regions. Of course, this can be done by using the Slicers feature of an Excel table or PivotTable or by inserting Subtotals. But why don't we make the report more user-friendly by inserting 4 checkboxes at the top?
Looks nice, isn't it? To create a similar report in your sheet, please follow these steps:
In the above screenshot, I2:I5 are linked cells and H2:H5 are the region names exactly as they appear in the report.
=IF(I2=TRUE, H2, "-")
Where:
Put the above argument together, and your DSUM formula goes as follows:
=DSUM(A5:F48, "sub-total", J1:J5)
…and works perfectly!
If you'd like to hide the #DIV/0! error that appears when no region is selected, wrap DSUM into the IFERROR function:
=IFERROR(DSUM(A5:F48, "sub-total", J1:J5), 0)
If in addition to total, your report calculates an average for each row, you can use the DAVERAGE(database, field, criteria) function to get a sales average for the selected regions.
Finally, hide and probably lock the criteria area to prevent accidental changes, and your interactive report is all set!
This example will teach you how to create a dynamic Excel chart that can respond to changing the checkboxes state (selected or cleared):
The source data for this example is as simple as this:
To turn it into a dynamic Excel graph, execute the following steps:
In particular, insert 2 checkboxes for the 2013 and 2014 years, and connect them to cells G2 and G3, respectively:
=IF($G$2=TRUE, B4, NA())
If the 2013 checkbox is selected (G2 is TRUE), the formula pulls the original value from B4, otherwise returns the #N/A error.
=IF($G$2=TRUE, C4, NA())
=$D4
, and copy it down to L7. Because the data for the year 2015 should always be displayed in the chart, an IF formula is not needed for this column.
This is how you can create and use checkboxes in Excel. To review all the examples discussed in this tutorial, you may want to download our sample workbook below. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next week.
Excel Checkbox examples (.xlsx file)
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