Conditional Dropdown menus

Sam Swain

Hi community,

Has anyone come up with a smart workaround for the conditional dropdown menus?

Ideally I'd like my sheet to have a dropdown list in Column1, and based upon what is selected in column 1, a specified group of values appear in a dropdown in column 2. This exists as a possibility in excel, but not in smartsheet.

Any ideas of how I'd work around this?

isabonita

@Sam Swain

It is possible - you do have to have a separate column for each sub dropdown...

This only works if you use a Form or Dynamic View Details Panel... you have to set up logic to hide/show the appropriate "sub" dropdown when the Main option is selected.

Then you need a formula in a column that will let you grab the information from the the other column.

I normally add in an automation to clear out values in the other dropdown columns - just in case someone changes the main dropdown.

COLUMN1 SUB-DD-VALUE COLUMN1-VALUE1-DD COLUMN1-VALUE2-DD etc...

It's not pretty! I keep hoping SS will create some magical way for us to have a more relational database experience...

Sam Swain

Thank you for answering Isa. I guess I need to get familiar with Dynamic View!

isabonita

@Sam Swain - if you have dynamic view - I highly recommend becoming familiar with it. It creates a great end-user experience.

Sam Swain

@isabonita thanks! If you'd be so kind I'd love to chat with you about it on my www.linkedin.com

If you don't have the time, no worries and thanks for the advice :)

Sam Swain

www.linkedin.com/in/sam-swain-60558321b

gmnorthey

Is there a better solution for situations where there are many values in the contingency? My guess is that this works acceptably when there are two or three contingencies, but for each additional contingency it will create a significant number of columns and conditional logic configuration to deploy this.

I have several sheets where I need for users to identify a school district and school. We work with 46 districts and about 425 schools so I would need to create 46 contingency columns and then maintain the data in each column. Furthermore, I need to do this in multiple sheets, so this would be quite the endeavor to maintain (and yes, I know how to use a data shuttle, but that would be an incredible number of data shuttles to maintain).

My current solution is to concatenate the column values, for example if "ABC Elementary" is a school within "XYZ School District" then I concatenate the values into a column where the value is "ABC Elementary (XYZ School District)". This works acceptably but would not be as ideal as true conditional columns, if schools have similar names, users might pick the wrong name by typing a keyword and clicking the name from the filtered drop-down list.

It seems like Smartsheet should already have the means to generate a conditional drop-down if a formula such as (COLLECTION) could be applied to the list of available values in the drop-down list.