How to Make Tick Mark in Excel

What this does

There are three routes and they behave differently. The Wingdings trick is fastest: with the cell in Wingdings, ü prints ✓, û prints ✗, and the boxed versions are ý and ý's neighbours. Insert ▸ Symbol inserts a real Unicode character (U+2713 ✓ or U+2714 ✔) that keeps working in any font. And =CHAR(252) with a Wingdings cell, or a conditional-formatting icon set, makes the mark appear automatically from a condition rather than being typed. A tick typed into a cell is decoration — if you need to count completions, store TRUE/FALSE or 1/0 and show the tick with formatting. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. For “make tick mark in excel”, the reliable version is a short checking loop, not just the first command that appears to work. Run it on a deliberately small range first, watch how the affected cells change, and only then apply the same setup to the full sheet. When this is a ribbon command, the selection matters more than the button: confirm the range, apply the command, then spot-check the output before saving. That is what makes a layout choice that keeps the sheet readable and sortable useful in real work: repeatable, auditable, and not dependent on memory or luck.

A worked example

Fast route: select C2, set the font to Wingdings, type ü and press Enter — the cell shows ✓. Unicode route: Insert ▸ Symbol ▸ Font: Segoe UI Symbol ▸ type 2713 in the Character code box ▸ Insert; this ✓ survives a font change. Automatic route: leave the source column as TRUE/FALSE and put =IF(B2, CHAR(252), "") in a Wingdings-formatted C2, so the tick appears when B2 is TRUE and =COUNTIF(B:B, TRUE) still counts correctly. Ticks show up in every checklist, QA sheet and status tracker, and the distinction that matters is whether the mark is decoration or the data — because only one of those can be counted. When the result is not what you expected, undo straight away rather than repairing it by hand — undo restores the sheet exactly, while manual fixes tend to leave small inconsistencies behind that surface later.

In Google Sheets

This is a command rather than a formula, so there is no syntax to carry over. Google Sheets arranges its commands in menus across the top instead of a ribbon, names some of them differently and does not have every Excel command — look for the equivalent in the Sheets menus or its help before assuming the steps match. Keep this page bookmarked for the next time the same question comes up. Better still, repeat the steps once in your own workbook — doing it yourself is what turns a copied answer into something you remember. If you take one thing from this page on “make tick mark in excel”, make it the order of checks rather than the individual clicks: confirm what is selected, apply the step, and look at the result before moving on. That small routine is what keeps Excel work predictable when the same task comes back in a slightly different workbook.

Common mistakes

• Typing ü in a non-Wingdings cell and getting a literal ü.
• Storing the tick character as the data and then being unable to count or filter it reliably.
• Using Wingdings characters in a file that will be opened on a machine without that font, where they fall back to letters — Unicode ✓ is the portable choice.
• Mixing ✓ (U+2713) and ✔ (U+2714) in one column so filters treat them as two different values.
• Reaching for a checkbox control when a data-driven ✓ from a formula would be simpler and easier to total.

Frequently asked questions