Alternative to Dependant Drop Down Lists?

Hi All

I'm trying to develop a worksheet for my department to help automate some of the writing of a management plan. We produce these plans for most projects we work on and they often end up having a lot of crossover and are presented as a table in the report, sounds like a perfect opportunity to use some named ranges and drop down lists right!

The issue I'm running into is that we have actions covering multiple topics, i.e. general, climate, water, noise etc. and these topics can be in three phases - pre-development, during development and post development.

My question is how best to organise this data and how to build our table. Ideally I would like to have all the possible actions in one table on a backpage that could be added to by my colleagues (they would include all relevant information - topic, phase, action) and on the front page the user select the topic, then the phase, then select an action from a drop down list filtered by a helper cell (concatenated by the topic and the phase i.e. GenPre, NoiDur, CliPos) pulling from the backpage. For example, if you selected Noise and Pre-Development, the Action drop down list would show only actions from the backpage table that had NoiPre in the helper column

Is it possible to use a helper cell to generate a filtered drop down list? if not will I need to create sheets/tables for each possible combination of topic/phase and use the helper cell to point the data validation towards?

[EDIT] Attachment added - sample of workbook

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A good sample workbook has just 10-20 rows of representative data that has been desensitised. It also has expected results mocked up, relevant cells highlighted and a few explanatory notes.

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Try the attached file - there are only two pages - NO formula or data validation or conditional formatting on either sheet - All performed by macro in Sheet Module.
I have place data in 'structured tables' they self maintain (expand/contract as data is added/deleted).
To expand tables simply enter data in next cell (column 'A') immediately under table (do not expand tables with unnecessary blank rows)
Click progressively (column B to D) with this unique selection/combination the rest of the cells should retrieve the relative data from the 'DEFAULT' sheet.
Any queries post back on this site.

Please review this post

https://www.excelforum.com/excel-for...ml#post5625764

It's might be help.

Regards.