The reason Hourly appears here, is because it already appeared above in the same column. Now, possibly, I would have wanted to enter Half-Time there, but the idea here is you don't type anything. For example, if I type the letter H right now, Hourly appears.

Now, a common question that I get when teaching this subject live is people say, can I type a letter and have the entry appear? And part of the reason they might think that is they might have done this in the past. Then use the arrow keys, come to the one you want, press Enter. You can also use from the keyboard, Alt + Down Arrow. And as soon as we click OK, we see the arrows appear here. But the entries that will be allowed here. And then highlight the cells in question. And we click Settings if it's not already selected. And set up a data validation rule by way of a Drop Down List.

Now, eventually, you might want to change the location of those. When you're setting up the Drop Down List, the Pick List that we're about to see, it's really handy to have the source data visible off to the right.

Now we're currently seeing these entries over in Column F. Let's imagine that in Column B we only want to allow four entries there. Anything that contributes to the idea I'm gonna be doing less typing, is generally favored by most users. You don't see those terms officially in Excel, but they're very popular with a lot of Excel users. For other users, for data entry purposes, we wanna make sure in Columns B, and C, and D, that the entries here occur much more fluently, much easier and with accuracy, by providing what are called Pick Lists, or Drop Down Lists. We're setting up a list here in Columns A through D. In the Chapter Two exercise file, the first worksheet is called Lists.

Drop down menu in excel 2016