- [Instructor] Okay, we're going to be doing something
a little bit different with this video.
It's going to pick up at the point
where you have a dropdown list in Google Sheets,
but you can't figure out how to get it
to allow more than one selection at a time.
So this video will give you three different options,
give multiple selections.
They can choose zero, they can choose one,
they can choose more than one.
And after they select them,
it will put the values into the cell.
It's not going to do it in their traditional dropdown lists,
but you can't do that,
so I'm hoping that one of these solutions will work for you.
Check it out.
(upbeat music)
So this first option is one that I found online
and it uses the built-in flexibility of Google Sheets
to run a custom script.
And I'll have this in the description of the video.
And I open this link in a new tab.
It's going to ask if I want to bring this spreadsheet
into my Google Drive, I'll click yes.
You have to give it permissions to run.
And after a little bit...
Mine took awhile, but it might happen right away for you.
You're going to get a new menu and it will say Sidebar.
If you left click on that,
and then you get the option to pop sidebar up
on the right hand side.
And this will give you a selection of choices
that's populated from the worksheet
that's called Validation.
So you can change the choices if you want.
And we'll come over back to sheet one and we'll try this.
And there you go.
And so you can see,
it has a little added feature
where it's counting the number of instances of each value.
So that may be helpful for you as well.
I just left it on there,
that's the way this spreadsheet comes.
So that's the first option
and if that's what you want, then you're done,
you don't need anything more.
The second two options
are going to present other original ways to do it.
Since there's no native option for a dropdown
in Google Sheets,
this is going to be work around number two.
And this one is going to be extremely important.
It is going to contain sensitive information,
it will be today's a lunch order.
What we'll do is we'll go to Insert and choose Form.
And what this will do, this will make a Google Form.
And this Google Form,
since you created it from Sheets,
is already linked to that sheet
and these responses are going to flow into it.
So for the first question, it's just going to be name.
That's going to be a short answer.
Google Forms is smart enough where it knows
that if you just want a name, it's a short answer,
so we're going to keep that.
Let's go over to the plus sign,
left click on it to get another question.
Now it's going to be toppings.
All right, so let's take a minute
to look at these different types.
And the short answer and the paragraph
obviously aren't going to be what you want
if you're looking for multiple selections.
Multiple choice, you may think it is,
but the little hint here is that it's a radio button.
And those on the web usually mean
that only one of the options can be selected.
Skip down because next one's our answer.
Dropdown only allows one in this circumstance.
So let's go back up, let's use checkboxes.
And when you use checkboxes,
you're going to see that you can select more than one.
And then you may want to choose some pickles.
You may, I probably want it, but hey, you never know.
And then our last choice here,
you can see there's, in blue,
an option that's called add other.
And this other is a smart type of other
where it will allow you to type in a custom value.
So not only are you going to be allowing multiple options,
you're also going to be allowing a wildcard
in this circumstance. You don't have to do that,
but that was a neat thing to show you.
Here we'll do a drop down.
You'll see that this only allows you to choose one.
Let's say, type of bread.
Or rye. We're not even going to give you the option
for white bread today.
Rye bread.
Now let's view this form as if it's been published.
So what you would do,
you would create this form
and then you would send that out to the people
who are going to be using the spreadsheet.
You can just send it as a link,
or you can email it.
Lots of different options here.
If you do want to learn more about Google Forms,
I'll link to another video
where you can learn about that right now.
But really, we have this form built out enough
where we're just ready to take a look at it.
So let's cancel this,
we're not going to actually send it,
we're going to preview it,
which is what you'd be seen if you got it.
Here you go, here's your lunch order, okay?
So we're still in Google Forms,
but this is connected to Sheets.
So let's say, Adam.
And we'll come down to the toppings.
Now wait for it, 'cause we want mustard and we want ketchup.
And then if we do the dropdown,
you can see you can only choose one of these two options.
And we'll left click on whole wheat.
The dropdown goes away.
I didn't even have a chance
to try to hold down the Control key
and select more than one.
It just lets you select one.
You click Submit and there you go, it took your lunch order.
Let's go back to the sheet that it's linked to.
It created a new tab,
so we'll select that down the bottom by left clicking on it.
And the form responses came in here.
Timestamp, you can ignore that for now.
But it just took the values that we put into Google Forms.
So it took my name, which was in a text box,
but here's what we're looking for.
So this was multiple selections.
I could have just gotten mustard, just ketchup,
I could've done nothing.
And this whole wheat is just a regular dropdown.
This is option number two as a workaround
since you can't do a multiple select dropdown
to give your spreadsheet users multiple options
to choose from.
Now the third alternative that we're going to go through
is truly an alternative,
'cause we're actually going to move out of Google Sheets.
Because I just wanted to show you
that there are some other programs out there
that work a lot like spreadsheets,
but they have more flexible data types
and they actually have multi-select dropdown lists built in.
(upbeat music)
So we'll open up a new tab.
I've been playing around with something called Notion,
so we're going to bring that up.
There's other options out there
and I'll link to those in the description.
But this particular one,
you can see I've been using
to try to get my website a little bit faster.
Sort of working.
But because I'm a spreadsheet guy,
I tend to use these as spreadsheets
even though they're actually database tables.
They're not spreadsheets
but you can use them in a similar way.
What we're going to do,
we're going to just create a new page.
We'll go over to the left and you can choose,
if you want to share this with other people,
you might just put it in your workspace.
Don't put it in private because you can't share that.
Left click on the plus sign, we're going to add a page.
We're going to call it...
And let's do lunch order again, right?
Let's stay with that, it was working.
And Notion has a lot of flexibility,
so you can do more than tables with it.
So you actually have to specify
that this is going to be a table database.
Left click on that.
And we're in familiar territory here.
You see a grid, you see headers.
Now, keep in mind this is a database,
so there's only one row where your headers can go
and they can't move around.
But this one says name, we're going to keep it like that.
And you'll see that the property type has a title already,
we're going to leave it as that.
But then this one that's called tags,
we're going to say toppings.
And it's actually already set to a multi-select
because it was called tags,
so it's kind of set up the take tags.
It's going to work for our toppings as well.
There's other data types you could have here,
but we can go into those in later videos.
We're going to use a multi-select right now
so you can see how it works.
I'll left click out of there because I'm done with that one.
And this one we were calling type of bread.
And this is set as a files and media file type,
which does not exist in Google Sheets by the way.
But we'll just make this a regular select
instead of a multi-select.
So your name is George, maybe.
I don't know, I'm taking a shot in the dark.
And the toppings that you want are mustard.
Okay, so what's happening here
is it's saying you're typing something new here.
So do you want to create this label?
It knows that it's not a preexisting selection.
So watch the go through and we'll do another one
and see how it acts once you've done this.
But we'll select mustard for now
and then we will also do mayo.
Left click on mayo.
So now you see both selections, they're both in here.
And let's go to the next cell for now.
Wanna do wheat bread.
Create.
So that's a single select.
And you see it already kicked me out of the edit mode
because it's not waiting for another one,
so it's designed to know
that this is going to be only one choice.
Now Mary comes in.
She wants to start with ketchup.
All right, now that doesn't exist so let's left click on it.
But then let's select from one of these existing ones.
So let's also do mustard.
You can do third one if you want, if she does want that.
So let's go over.
We can only choose one of these.
She wants rye, let's give her that one.
Now let's do a third one just to show that you can...
Hey.
Let's do a third one just to show
that you can also select nothing
if you're, you know, a picky eater.
This is a Hayward and he doesn't want anything.
And he wants wheat bread. So you can just leave this empty,
it doesn't give you any type of error.
Now this is similar to Google Sheets
in that now you can share this if you want.
It has all different types of sharing controls.
You could add formulas in here
if you really want to add up your sandwich.
But just for the basics that I wanted to show you
is that you can do multi-select dropdowns
in a web application.
It's just not Google Sheets.
So we're all working in different situations,
but hopefully one of these three solutions will fit
what you're trying to do.
And if you want to learn more about Google Forms,
I put up a playlist in the upper right hand corner
where you can check out other videos
on that subject, thanks.