I want to make a survey with Excel and I therefore have defined the cells for the answers as a dropdown cell which only accepts answers from a certain list, e. g.:

The two Lists List1 and List2 (yellow cells) are the possible answers for the questions in Block 1.x resp. 2.x (blue) . There might be a block 4 with more questions, which again use List1 for their possible answers.

My problem is: I'd like to be able to use the autocompleate feature to fill in the blue cells with the dropdown menu, so that the user only types 5 and it automatically expands to "5: extremely important" or "5: extremely difficult".

According to my research on the www, this should be possible if I add the list with possible answers directly above the cells where autocomplete should work (I did this with the green helper cells which could be hidden) . But I have to enter at least 4 characters 5: e to get the autocompleted suggestion.

Is there a way to make autocomplete already replace a "5" by the corresponding valid term?

As the survey file shall be distributed to a lot of people "outside", I can not use VBA magic because it may be blocked on their computer and might not work.

EDIT: it seems to have to do with the numbers I use: If I'd start my List items with A, B, C instead of 1, 2, 3, it would work perfectly. Excel seems to ignore the pure numbers when they are entered and does not try to autocomplete them.. is there a workaround?

(I hope it is clear what I want, it seems a little difficult to explain.)