The wait is over my Type A friends - Excel finally has checkboxes!!!!! Now, you might be thinking…didn’t they already have those? Yes, BUT, the old way was clunky, and these new checkboxes are easy to use and have a ton of cool features!
Check out the gif above: we’ve got a basic to-do list and want to add checkboxes to check off each task once it's complete (just the thought of that is satisfying 😍). To insert Excel’s new checkboxes, all we need to do is select the cells that we’d like to have a checkbox, navigate to the insert tab, select the checkbox command, and that’s it!!
If this doesn’t sound exciting, don’t worry, we haven’t gotten to the best part yet! These checkboxes are truly next level because they automatically set the value of the cell to TRUE when the box is checked and to FALSE if it’s unchecked! This is wildly valuable because it allows us to reference our checkboxes in formulas and calculate values based on whether a checkbox is checked. This opens up a world of possibilities!!
Let’s say, for example, we’d like to count the number of tasks we’ve completed in our list - we could just use the COUNTIF function to determine the numbers of boxes checked by counting the numbers of cells equal to true. All we need to do is enter the COUNTIF function, select the checkboxes as our range, and enter true as the criteria argument. Now, every time we check off a task, our completed task calculation will automatically update!
This is just one example of the endless use cases for these new checkboxes!! Just imagine all of the tasks you can organize. If you’d like to learn more about this exciting new tool, check out this quick YouTube Tutorial I made!
