Populating a dropdown based of the entry in another dropdown

Garrett Williams

Apologies if this has been asked and I just cant find it. I'm new to Smartsheet after spending several years working with Access.

I would like to have a dropdown auto-populate based off of the selection in another dropdown.

Each selection in the department dropdown will have multiple "areas" within them. So if I selected "Mill General" in Department, the Area dropdown should auto-populate with "Front Gate", "Fueling Station", "Oil Hall", etc. The purpose of the "area" dropdown would be to further narrow the criteria of the entry so that a search function later on may yield more specific results. See below:

David Tutwiler

Another option would be to add each of your Department options as another column. For instance, you'd have a column that said Mill General - Options and that column would contain a drop-down for Front Gate, Fueling Station, etc. Then in your form you use Logic to say:

If Mill General is selected in the drop-down -> Display the Mill General Options drop-down

You would essentially have 1 column for each Department and 1 logic rule for each Department.

MCorbin

There isn't a way to automatically narrow down a dropdown list (I wish there was!)

As an alternative, you can look at what Smartsheet did in the Engage'20 portal template that they made available for attendees. They created sections within the dropdown so you can tell which selections go with which categories (in this case, which sessions go with each time slot)

David Tutwiler

Another option would be to add each of your Department options as another column. For instance, you'd have a column that said Mill General - Options and that column would contain a drop-down for Front Gate, Fueling Station, etc. Then in your form you use Logic to say:

If Mill General is selected in the drop-down -> Display the Mill General Options drop-down

You would essentially have 1 column for each Department and 1 logic rule for each Department.

Garrett Williams

Thanks David,

That is more work that I thought it would be but it sounds like it would resolve the problem. I have not played with logic much. I will try this out.

David Tutwiler

It is a little clunky, for sure. But Logic is pretty powerful when looking at doing this kind of stuff.