Excel 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

21

Working with Lists

A list of items is a commonly occurring abstraction in the physical world. For example, people make lists of things to do, groceries to buy, stocks to review, places to visit, shows to watch, books to read, and on and on. In this chapter we will explore lists, the relationships lists have with ranges, and how you can publish and share your lists online.

Creating a List

A list is like a range with added features. When you create a list from a range of cells, Excel adds an auto filter list to the top of the list automatically, which permits the list to be sorted and filtered, an insert point, and a resize handle on the bottom-right side of the list which makes it easy to resize the list manually.

Creating a list couldn't be easier. Click anywhere in a contiguous range of cells and press Ctrl+L or select Data List Create List and the Create List dialog box (see Figure 21-1) will popup, displaying a reasonably good guess as to the cells that your list will comprise. Check “My list has headers” if the first row of your list represents header information. After you click OK, the list will be created with drop-down filter lists at the top of each column and an insert row at the bottom of each column.

Figure 21-1

Each of the elements described (except for the totals ...