synchronized dropdown lists

Mounika

Hi, does Smartsheet allow for synchronized dropdown lists? For instance, I have two fields named 'Profession', and 'Field of Practice', if in the ‘Profession’ field the person answers Biologist, can the options that appear on the field ‘Field of Practice’ be limited to the values that would fall under the biology category?

And also, for the dropdown fields, if the participant types in the most appropriate answer will it show the match of option in the dropdown list? Because, I have very huge dropdown list, which will make participant to take more time to scroll down to choose their answers.

Thanks,

Mounika

Nick Korna

That would depend if your many professions have any overlap.

For example if you have 50 Professions where 20 of them have common Fields of Practice, another 20 share common FOP and the last 10 have common FOP, you could only need 3 Fields of Practice columns (A-C) with your Form Logic like this (using 1-20 for ease, but they don't have to be sequential):

You're only looking to narrow down the options realistically - your extra Fields of Practice columns don't have to be 100% perfect. If there is just 1 option that couldn't be valid, it's better than if there are a lot from the full list!

If needs be you can set up automation to alert someone if a genuine mismatch occurred - i.e. someone selects a Profession/Field of Practice option that isn't valid.

Nick Korna

Regarding being able to type things in, if you've left the Form as the default single dropdown option, then someone would be able to use this to narrow things down. For example, in this list of items containing several Cat related options:

Typing the word "Cat" in narrows it down to related options:

Nick Korna

If the data is being filled out on a form, it can be easier to have separate dropdown columns and then one which combines them all (since only one would be filled in). You then use logic for which is displayed.

For example, you have Professions A, B & C and Fields of Practice 1-9 (where 1-3 applies to A, 4-6 to B, 7-9 to C). The Field of Practice columns end up as:

Field of Practice A: dropdown options 1, 2, 3

Field of Practice B: 4, 5, 6

Field of Practice C: 7, 8, 9

Field of Practice (combined) is a simple formula: =JOIN([Field of Practice A]@row:[Field of Practice C]@row, "")

Your Profession column lets you pick the relevant A-C, and then you can only pick the relevant Fields of Practice. If a field of practice is applicable to multiple professions, you simply include the options in both lists while trimming out any unnecessary ones.

If the data is being entered directly onto the sheet, then typing some of the word in will narrow down the dropdown options. For example, typing in "Bio" would remove options not starting with "Bio" which should hopefully remove a lot of options. In this case, you are probably fine to stick with a single column rather than the previous option.

Hope this gives you some ideas, but if you've any questions about anything then just post! 🙂

Mounika

Hi @Nick Korna

Thank you for the response.

In my case, i have more than 10 professions, which means will have to create more than10 columns for the 'Field of practice'. Do you think is this efficient? Are there any other alternatives?

For my second question, I mean in form, when completing the form, if the participant search using a word, can the dropdown menu show the relevant options, excluding others?

Nick Korna

That would depend if your many professions have any overlap.

For example if you have 50 Professions where 20 of them have common Fields of Practice, another 20 share common FOP and the last 10 have common FOP, you could only need 3 Fields of Practice columns (A-C) with your Form Logic like this (using 1-20 for ease, but they don't have to be sequential):

You're only looking to narrow down the options realistically - your extra Fields of Practice columns don't have to be 100% perfect. If there is just 1 option that couldn't be valid, it's better than if there are a lot from the full list!

If needs be you can set up automation to alert someone if a genuine mismatch occurred - i.e. someone selects a Profession/Field of Practice option that isn't valid.

Nick Korna

Regarding being able to type things in, if you've left the Form as the default single dropdown option, then someone would be able to use this to narrow things down. For example, in this list of items containing several Cat related options:

Typing the word "Cat" in narrows it down to related options:

Mounika

Thank you so much @Nick Korna

This really helps!

In another instance, I have a list of 600 institutions, and I need to add this list to dropdown. Would it possible in Smartsheet? If yes, are there workarounds that I can implement to make this efficient.

I don't think anyone can spare time to look into such huge list answer the question.

Nick Korna

Looking at some other topics on the matter, you probably can add all 600 institutions in a dropdown but this may be a little bit messy if someone doesn't know they can type in a partial to narrow results or they use something very common to try and narrow it down (for example, "hospital" in a list of hospitals).

The list could be potentially broken down into more manageable chunks in a similar fashion (for example by country, region or state) in a similar fashion to above - I would definitely do this if you have very similarly named locations that confusing the 2 would result in unexpected/unwanted results!