Dependent drop down list

Maxine Roberts

This any way to have the dropdown lists only display certain options based on what is selected in another cell e.g. If you select January in the Month cell the drop down box only displays the week commencing dates in January?

Valdeir Faria F.

That sounds like conditional formatting or even the logic questions we have in forms. Unfortunately, the dropdown menu cannot be customized using either of the mentioned methods.

Maxine Roberts

It not using forms it's inputting data straight into a grid, I have asked the question in the EAP group as I think this may be a function that would be beneficial to be included as it's not just myself within my organisation who has found Smartsheet a bit lacking in this area.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Maxine Roberts

To add to Valdeir's excellent advice/answer,

As a possible workaround, you could use a combination of Conditional formatting, formulas showing descriptive text, and multiple helper columns for each drop-down option.

Make sense?

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Maxine Roberts

@Andrée Starå not really it would ideally need to display only the options in the drop down that are applicable either from another piece of information in the grid or depending on the data in another grid.

I just think the functionality needed for this is not available at present which is why I raised it in the EAP group as this may be of benefit to be added.

Dominic Castelli

@Maxine Roberts, I completely agree with your assertion that this would be useful. I need to create a form that has multiple layers of cascading selections that can only be realized by using dependent dropdowns. I have used this many times in MS Excel and it is disappointing that this functionality is not available in Smartsheet.

Jon SF

Agree. Instead of having 5 different sheets for slightly different lists (e.g. RAID versus Action Items), I have everything together. So I'd like the status field to show only options for the "type" of information entered in that row (e.g. risk type has the status options of "mitigated" or "accepted" and action item type should have "complete" "in progress" ETC.

Sherry Fox

I agree, this IS a needed feature, and I use this constantly within Excel. It is not any form of conditional formatting. If in Dropdown 1 there are 10 different choices to be made, dropdown 2 would have different choices for EACH of those chosen in the first dropdown. As an analyst, this is quite helpful, as the end user often does not know the the proper choices. So they make the first choice, and we give them a small # of choices that are relevant ONLY to that first choice. It improves the accuracy of the data received substantially.