How-To

How to Create a Checklist in Google Sheets

By Brian Burgess

Published April 13, 2022

It might seem basic, but it used to be pretty difficult to add checkboxes to Google Sheets. The process is much easier these days, so here’s how to do it.

Google Sheets is the free and online alternative to Microsoft Excel which you can use in your web browser. It’s powerful, with many of the same features as Excel, allowing you to organise and analyse your data.

For example, you can use Google Sheets to track stocks, create custom number formats, etc. If you’re trying to improve your productivity, you might even want to checklist in Google Sheets.

Creating checklists in Google Sheets used to be difficult, but the process has improved. If you want to create a checklist in Google Sheets, here’s what you’ll need to know.

How to Create a Checklist in Google Sheets

To create a checklist in Google Sheets:

1. Open the Google Sheets spreadsheet in your browser (or create a new one).
2. Prepare the spreadsheet with data to allow you to create a list (for example, add a list of products to check off in a column).
3. Select the column and rows to the right of the list where you want the checkboxes to appear.
4. After selecting the column and rows, click Insert from the toolbar are the top.
5. From there, select Checkbox from the menu.
6. That’s it. Your checkboxes will appear in the Google Sheet where you specified.
7. The checkboxes will appear—press the checkboxes individually to mark or unmark the values.
8. Alternatively, select the checkbox, then type TRUE or FALSE in the formula bar, where TRUE means the checkbox is checked, while FALSE means it’s unchecked.
9. If you want to allow other users to mark checkboxes, make sure to update the sharing settings to allow full edit access to the spreadsheet.

Using Google Sheets

Creating a checklist in Google Sheets is a useful (if basic) feature, and we’re glad to see Google continue to update Google Sheets to add features like this.

There are other features in Google Sheets you can take advantage of, however. For example, you could decide to create custom number formats, apply conditional formatting to cells, or even try inserting an image into a cell.