Completely agree this is a GAPING HOLE in the functionality!

It's appalling that Smartsheet doesn't provide the support to leverage cross-sheet linking capabilities to dynamically drive the contents of a drop-down (aka the equivalent of using a named-range in excel). The manual effort and amount of time that is wasted on drop-down value maintenance across a suite of sheets for a given project is a detriment to the efficient use smartsheet.

Both the contacts lists (which is it's own feature/object type) and user-defined columns that need their own user-defined list of valid values; they need to be able to be maintained from a central place within a Workspace or within a project folder.

As Michael indicated, the more you use Smartsheet the bigger this issue becomes. This is a gap that limits the effective growth and broad penetration of Smartsheet within an organization, because there is an exponential increase in sheet maintenance costs the more the product is used.

Do yourself and all of the worksheet owners a service and find a way of supporting automated maintenance of drop-down lists.

The geek in me can't resist providing a suggestion.

In the column properties dialog, add an input field that allows the user to link the drop down to

a) one or more contact groups (for a contact type column) OR

b) to a cell or a group of cells from another sheet (for a single or multi-select column type).

The linkages could be evaluated upon sheet opening or refresh to reduce the performance impact.