Forming your spreadsheet

First you have to make sure, that your forms toolbar is visible. If not, you can "activate" it by clicking View from the menu and then choose Toolbars > Forms.

Assuming you have a small list of let's say account managers as in the screenshot shown below you should mark the data by simply selecting all cells containing data (excluding the heading cell)

By pressing CTRL + F3 you can define names (it should be unique). Imagine you give it the very adequate name of "accountManagers". Click OK.

Now on to sheet 2 where we have a (yet very small) list of clients, we want to assign account managers to. Click the Combo Box icon shown below and "draw" a box that matches the size of your rows.

We now right-click on our combo-box and choose Format control from the upcoming context menu. In the dialog box we enter our previously defined name (here "accountManagers") into the Input Range field and voilà, if we click outside the box somewhere in our sheet we have the possibility to assign a account Manager to our client.

In one of my next posts I will show you how to use the selection in this combo box as a condition for further details (e. g. phone number of the account manager depending on who is selected).

What do you think? Is this small trick helpful? Do you have any suggestions for what purposes this technique could be used? Post a comment to this post.

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