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Numbers 08 & Dropdown menus

T

tattooedpierre

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 5, 2007
15
0
Glasgow, Scotland
Hi,

I'm creating a finanical calculator using Numbers '08 and the only thing left to do is to have a dropdown menu so I can select a particular item that is going to produce a value.

Is that possible in Numbers? I can't find any options to create a dropdown, I know this is possible in Excel; was hoping I could do the same here. I find Numbers far easier on the eye and more friendly to use otherwise.
 
tattooedpierre said:
Hi,

I'm creating a finanical calculator using Numbers '08 and the only thing left to do is to have a dropdown menu so I can select a particular item that is going to produce a value.

Is that possible in Numbers? I can't find any options to create a dropdown, I know this is possible in Excel; was hoping I could do the same here. I find Numbers far easier on the eye and more friendly to use otherwise.
Click to expand...

Yes you can, just set the cell format to "pop-up menu" in the inspector, and you can enter the popup items to select from.
 
Getting the criteria for a POP UP Menu

In excel, you are able to use a section or table as the data for a drop down menu.

Can you somehow do this in Numbers 09


example

TABLE 1 has Location data, each line is a destination corresponding cell has distance

STATUE OF LIBERTY 39.4 Miles
EMPIRE STATE BLDG 38.4 Miles
etc...

I want the pop up menu to allow me to select one of the destinations in the formatted cell
 
Sure ... the "mileage" cell would do a HLOOKUP/VLOOKUP (depending how you formatted the table) based on the value in the "location" cell. Should be very similar to Excel.

Numbers, as I suppose Excel can, could also lookup in a separate table, so for simplicity's sake, you could store you data in one table and do your "work" in another. If the table is particularly large, however, you'll see a performance degradation in Numbers (at least I do on my 1.66 GHz 1G Mac mini. YMMV)

mt
 
The Hard Part

ok thats the easy part,

The hard part is to get the DROP DOWN Box (Excel TERM)

What I want is to click on a cell and be able to pick the location from the pop up menu. (the list of items in that menu would be in a different table or even on the same table in a different area)
 
Sorry ... I thought this was the easy part ...

Select the cell where you want the menu ...

Open Inspector (blue circle with lowercase i)

Click the "Cell Format" button (the one with the "42" icon)

A menu appears ... select "Pop-up menu"

A box appears with "1, 2, 3" on different lines.

Double-click exactly on the "1" and you can edit it to what you want.

Use the "+" key to add more menu entries.

done.

mt
 
I did see that when I was looking before.

But I already have the 1,2,3, list in the spreadsheet elsewhere
is there a way to have the 1,2,3 popup list reference the list that is in the spreadsheet?

The list I have is about 40 different destinations with corresponding mileage
so I dont want to have to retype or cut and paste them one by one into the popup menu if I can avoid it.
 
tshrtkng said:
The list I have is about 40 different destinations with corresponding mileage so I dont want to have to retype or cut and paste them one by one into the popup menu if I can avoid it.
Click to expand...

I'm trying to do something similar - use a secondary table to populate the pop-up values. Any solution for this?
 
Thanks Everyone

Hello,

I have been a beneficiary of the help you ALL have put here in response to people's questions. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO DO THIS!!:D
 
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