What's better than a drop-down menu in a worksheet? A color-coded drop-down! Let's learn how to take our drop-down menus to the next level by adding dynamic color rules to more easily reflect project status.
Check out the gif above for an example: we've got a project tracker in Google Sheets, and we want to insert drop-downs into the status column that automatically change the color of the cell based on input: green if "complete" is selected, yellow if "in progress" is selected, and red if "not started" is selected. To start, we'll need to create the drop-down menus by selecting the status column, opening the data menu, and selecting data validation.
Once the data validation window appears, we'll press the "new rule" button, select drop-down as the criteria, and then enter our drop-down values (Not Started, In Progress, and Complete, in this case). Finally, we'll choose a fill color for each of those values using the fill color drop-downs - red, yellow, and green to match our status options. We'll hit done to insert our new drop-downs, and that's it! Now we can select a project status and the cell color will dynamically update!
Unfortunately, this capability isn't available in Excel, but this is a great solution for Google Sheets!
