Microsoft Excel – Create a bulleted list in a cell

For those of you who like bulleted lists and are frustrated that you can’t insert one in a cell, there is a way to insert bullet points in a cell to emulate such a thing. Just keep in mind that this isn’t a true list, so you can’t generate more bulleted lines by inserting a new line – you have to insert a bullet character on each line. That said, here’s how you do it:

With your cell selected and in edit mode (reminder: press F2 to go into edit mode), position the cursor where you want a bullet point. Then press ALT+0149 to generate a bullet character. And, just to refresh your memory, to insert a new line in the cell you press ALT+Enter.

Hint If you’re doing this on a laptop, enable Num Lock so that you’ll have a numeric keypad to use. Otherwise, you’ll get just as frustrated as I did by trying to enter the ALT+0149 key combination by using the number keys in the number row on the keypad. What happens is that the Open dialog box is displayed after I press the 4 in the key combination. It seems that pressing ALT+4 opens this dialog box, so for some reason the 0 and 1 appear to be ignored. My pain, your gain.

On most laptops, to enable Num Lock, you press SHIFT+Num Lock or Fn+Num Lock. If your laptop (typically a smaller model, such as a netbook) doesn’t have a Num Lock key, see its documentation to learn how to enable it.