Create a bulleted list in a cell

Today’s blog post is brought to you by Gary Willoughby. Gary is a writer on Office.com who has created and edited content about Excel, Access, and Project.

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.