Smart tags in Excel are the little triangles in the corner of cells that sometimes appear, and when clicked lead you to a menu.

Their intent is to provide the user with added options based on the content in a cell. For example; if a user types a company name in a cell, the smart tag triangle could appear, and on the smart tag menu there might be options to see the Company’s stock price, Homepage, Contact info, etc.

I usually ignore most smart tags, however I always pay attention to the one that says “Inconsistent Formula”, in which case I always double check my work to verify I intended the inconsistency.

Developing Simple Smart Tags by Paul Cornell is an excellent article on the basics of rolling your own smart tag. After a 10 minute read I had a smart tag created, The Bored Smart Tag: When the word “Bored” is typed in a cell a smart tag displays a list of Websites to visit.

Try it Yourself
1. Right Click the file Bored.xml and Choose SAVE TARGET AS

2. Save the file to the directory:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Smart Tag\Lists

3. Open Excel and type the word Bored in a cell

Notes:
You can easily modify the download to add you own websites.

Smart tags require a later version of Excel to work.

Unfortunately the smart tag is stored in an external file which doesn’t make the solution easily portable.

Does anyone know of a simple “Hello World” tutorial for running a macro from a Smart tag menu item? Update: I found my answer, “The down side to MOSTLs are that the actions are limited to Hyperlinks.”