Combo Box Font in MS Excel?

Question

Does anyone know a way that I can enlarge the font for options in a drop-down list (combo box from the 'Forms' menu) in Excel please?

I am using the box on a map sheet, which is displayed at 25% of full size, and although I can make the combo box itself bigger, the text is unreadably small. Thanks.

Answer 1

I would recommend using the Combo Box from the Control Toolbox toolbar instead of the Combo Box from the Forms toolbar. The forms toolbar is mainly kept around to support older versions of Excel. That is why you can't change the text size. The controls from the forms toolbar run on an old programming language that is hardly ever used anymore. The controls from the controls toolbox toolbar have many more options and ways that you can control what they do and they are run on VBA programming language which is what Excel is made to work with now.

Open the Control Toolbox toolbar and the Visual Basic toolbar. On the Control Toolbox toolbar select the combo box button and create your combo box. Then right click on the combo box and select properties. In the properties window, select the Categorized Tab and go to ListFillRange in the Miscellaneous group. Enter your cell range in there just as you regularly would for Excel (example: A1:A10 for cells A1 to A10). Then go to Font under the Font category and select the line (by default it should say Arial). Then click the little three dotted gray block at the far right to select your type of font and font properties. Close the Properties window when you are done and then click the toolbar button on the Visual Basic tool bar that looks like a drafting triangle (clicking that button takes you in and out of design mode for the controls from the control toolbox toolbar). When you are out of design mode the controls work. When you are in design mode you can edit the controls.

Answer 2

There may be a way to resize the font in a combo box from the forms toolbar in VBA. However, I can't find it and I don't think there is another way.

On the other hand, if you use a combo box from the controls toolbar, then you can right-click it and choose Properties. You can set the font size there.

Tim
http://www.tvmcalcs.com

Answer 3

I have just tried enlarging text in an inserted comment in Excel, maybe it would also work with a Combo Box, I clicked on the comment, selected EDIT, highlighted the text and increased the text size a couple of notches, but I guess you have already tried something that simple.