Spinners are Tops!

Okay, okay, I know that the title of this week’s blog is corny, but Hey, Spinners are nonetheless Very Cool!

Spinners are Form Controls which you can place into an Excel Worksheet to give you Interactive Functionality with your data. By adding a spinner button control to a worksheet and linking it to a cell, you can return a numeric value from the position of the control, and go on to use that value in conjunction with other functions (e.g. Offset, Index, etc) to return values from lists.

What is so Cool about Spinner buttons is that they provide an intuitive approach to controlling the data you enter into your spreadsheets, and make you look Brilliant while doing it (that is, after all, the most important thing…). 

To find where they are located, (in Excel versions 2010 or later), do the following: 

1. Click on File in the upper-left and select Options 
2. Choose Customize Ribbon and then put a checkmark next to Developer

3. Click Okay 

After you have completed the above, the Developer ribbon will be available on your toolbar. Along with a great many exciting resources (you can spend days exploring them), the Developer ribbon supplies all the Form Controls. Hover your mouse over the selections until you see Spinner button, give it a click, and draw the button on your worksheet. 

Now is where the Fun begins! Right-click on the spinner, and then click Format Control. In the initial test of this cool control, enter the following in the boxes on the Control tab dialogue box:

1. Current value: 1 
2. Minimum value: 1 
3. Maximum value: 30 
4. Incremental value 1 
5. Cell link: $B$2 (Note: You can choose any value…) 

Now when you click the Spinner control, cell B2 is be updated according to the numbers you choose. You can then use that number to do Wondrous Things (or at least pretty cool stuff…) in Excel!

Use Spinner Buttons in your Excel worksheets to make it look like someone spent hours of programming time designing them. In just 5 minutes you can make amazing additions to your worksheets that are just too good to miss. If you have never tried the Form Controls, give them a Spin! It may open a new world for you…