Link items to categories in a list in Excel
<p>The context of my problem is that I have to lists:</p>

<ul>
<li>One list of categories</li>
<li>One list of items</li>
</ul>

<p>The number of categories/items in both list can vary, as well as their order in it.</p>

<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5xSzY.png" alt="example for the two lists"></p>

<p>My problem is that I want to implement 2 possible types of actions:</p>

<ul>
<li>The first action is to be able to assign each item to one or more categories. For example, I am the user of the excel sheet and I want to assign item 3 to categories 1, 2 and 4 (via checkbox or other means).</li>
<li>The second action is to be able to highlight all the items in a category by selecting this category (either select the cell or the category in a dropdown list). For example, is items 1 an 3 belong to category 1, we would have the following results when selecting category 1:
<img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/9HkEL.png" alt="Resulting view when selecting category 1"></li>
</ul>

<p>I would like to realize this in an excel spreadsheet with VBA macro. I tried to find technical solutions in order to implement this but without success. Indeed, I would need to link variables to a cell (in order to assign categories to item) but I found no way to do that (classical use of variables and arrays are too restricted for the requirements). </p>

<p>My questions are therefore:</p>

<ul>
<li>Do you think the proposed application is implementable in excel (potentially with VBA) ?</li>
<li>Do you have ideas of what technical solutions I could use in order to implement it so that I have a starting point to solve my problem ?</li>
</ul>