Add tick boxes to cells

A tick box turns a cell into a box you click instead of a cell you type TRUE or FALSE into. Use them for checklists, or for a column that marks which rows are done.

Turn cells into tick boxes

1. Select the cells you want tick boxes in.
2. Open the Insert menu and click Tick box.

You can also right-click the selection and choose Tick box. Both routes do the same thing, and neither opens a dialog.

Empty cells in the selection get the value FALSE and show an empty box. Cells that already hold TRUE or FALSE keep the value they have, so pointing tick boxes at a column you filled in earlier does not change your data.

If you select a whole column by clicking its letter, Sheets covers the rows that hold something, not all thousand empty rows below them.

Tick and untick

Click the box itself to switch the cell between TRUE and FALSE. Clicking anywhere else in the cell selects it the usual way, so you can copy a tick box or read it in the formula bar without flipping it.

With the cell selected, press Space or Enter to toggle it from the keyboard.

A cell that holds a formula does not toggle. Writing TRUE into it would replace the formula, so the box shows the result and stays as it is.

What the cell holds

A ticked box is the value TRUE and an empty box is FALSE. So a TRUE that arrives some other way (typed in, pasted, imported from Excel, or produced by a formula) draws as a ticked box too.

If a cell in the range holds something else, such as a word, it shows the word and no box, with a red triangle in its top-left corner. Clear the cell or type TRUE or FALSE to get the box back.

Use your own values instead

Insert → Tick box is a shortcut for the Checkbox validation rule with TRUE and FALSE as its two values. To use a different pair, such as Yes and No, set the rule up in Data → Data validation instead and fill in the Selected and Not selected values. A box with custom values looks like any other tick box, and the formula bar shows the value it holds. See Set up data validation.

Remove tick boxes

1. Select the cells.
2. Open Data → Data validation.
3. Click Delete validation.

The boxes go away, and the values stay: a cell that was ticked now reads TRUE. To clear those as well, keep the cells selected and press Delete.