Multiple non-duplicate dependent dropdown menus

[mrjoelfeldman2]

Hi guys

Excel noob here. I've looked around but can't find out what the best way to do the following. If I have the following sheet:

What I basically want to do is a have a drop down menu for the first column "variety", which would have three entries, i.e. ultra, mega and budget monitors. Then there would be a second dropdown which you could only select the corresponding sizes for which variety you chose. So if you chose 'Mega monitor' you could then only choose "25" or "22" from the next drop down. In the third and final drop down, you can only choose the corresponding 'veneer' items depending on your first two choices. In this example, if you chose "22", you can then only choose from 'brass' and 'copper'. Finally, If you choose 'brass', the sheet displays the corresponding price for mega monitor -> 22 -> brass, i.e. the price of "94".

Is this possible? Hoping to find out the best way to go about this. I have a large number of sheets like this, and they're much more complex. I don't really want to engage in re-sorting the information too much, e.g. setting up pivot tables or extracting unique values for each column etc. I imagine if I have to do all that I would be better off using Access.

Many thanks for any help that can be provided

 

[VoG]

This should help you http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal02.html

 

[mrjoelfeldman2]

Thanks VoG, that's very helpful. That seems to cover off on the dependent dropdown menu aspect. I don't think it touches on how to create menus that remove duplicate content. I have search around the web for this, it seems to be asked a lot, but never with a straightforward answer. Do you know of any resources that explain how I can make all of the dependent drop-down menus not have duplicate content in them? E.g. with my example, the first menu would only have 3 entries for each type of monitor rather than 12 entries?

 

[VoG]

I think that you would need to create a separate table showing the unique (non-duplicated) values for each category. Then use that to build your dependent data validation.