Dynamically populate a drop-down list

SJ Sellers

Hi @Sarah123 - I hope you have voted on the ideas that Andree linked above on Aug 8. It is ridiculous and beyond disappointing that Smartsheet has not delivered this despite their customers complaining about it for 8-10 years.

The overhead for my company to maintain drop-down lists will be in the thousands of hours annually due to the size of our deployment. This maintenance creates employee retention issues - as you can imagine, few people find maintaining drop-down lists fulfilling.

Sarah123

@SJ Sellers I did! And yeah I can only imagine how fulfilling that would be (not).

Sarah123

@Andrée Starå How do I get the drop down list to update from another list?

Sarah123

Thanks @Andrée Starå - I think I figured it out based on your info. I have another sheet that collects the drop down selections. This is then exported to a Google Doc and if the item isn't in the drop down then it reuploads the file to update the drop down menu to ensure that any new drop downs are now added. Works perfect! 😀

Andrée Starå

@Sarah123

Excellent!

You're more than welcome!

Do you want to use the Google part, or would you prefer to keep it all in Smartsheet?

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Sarah123

If I could keep it all in Smartsheet that'd be even better. Edit: Just updated to create an attachment of the file within Smartsheet so it never leaves. Thanks for the idea!

zealvert

With all due respect, it's a bit painful to learn that some very "basic and obvious" features (e.g., dynamically updating the dropdown lists) have been absent for a long period, and then introduced as a premium/paid feature.

I think most of us would agree, that not all enhancements are always some sort of invention or breakthrough innovation. Sometimes, they're merely the gaps in a system that should be filled once identified.

To ascertain whether something is a gap or not, we can always explore a vast spectrum of similar products in the market.