How to Create a Dependent Drop-Down List in Google Sheets

The drop-down lists are useful when you are creating data entry forms or creating interactive dashboards to visualize your data. Sometimes, you may need to create drop-down list depending on another dropdown list, in other words, a dependent drop-down list. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a second drop-down list, which is populated dynamically as the value in the first drop-down list change.

Creating a dependent drop-down list in Google Sheets is easy compared to Microsoft Excel. Here I am using the powerful QUERY() function to generate the dependent list.

Creating a dependent drop-down list in Google Sheets

Let’s say you are going to create a data entry form that consists of two fields with drop-down lists, namely “Region” and “Country“. A region consists of many countries. The country drop-down list should be populated dynamically as the region changes.

To do this, first, you need to create a drop-down list using data validation. Then you need to create a candidate list for the second dropdown list. This can be done using, the Google Sheet QUERY function. Then you can use it to generate the dependent drop-down list.

Creating the main drop-down list

This is straightforward. You can use the data validation option to create the main drop-down list.

1. Select the cell you want to create the drop-down list.
2. Go to Data> Data Validation.
3. In the popup window, for the first box of the Criteria field, select “List from a range” (yes, it is the default option).
4. For the Data Range, we use our region list. Here I have named the range as “Regions“. So I type the range as Regions in the Data Range box.
5. Add validation text as necessary and click Save.

Now your main drop-down is ready, and it shows only the unique values in the region list.

Creating the dependent drop-down list

Before creating the dependent drop-down list, you need to create a candidate list (List of countries in the selected region) to be used in the data validation. This list should be dynamically updated when you choose the region from the main dropdown list.

Creating the candidate list

For this purpose, I am going to use the Google Sheets QUERY() function. The function looks like the following:

=query(CountriesByRegion,"select B where A='"&RegionDL&"'")

In the above function, I have used “Named Ranges” to make the function more readable. “A” and “B” are column labels.

The argument CountriesByRegion is the table which includes all the list of regions and countries (or you may use A1 notation for this; e.g. A2:B213). And the Region refers to the cell which contains the main drop-down list. The above function filters the countries of the selected region and creates a filtered list, as shown in the following video.

Set data validation

Now you can use the above-filtered list to create another data validation rule for the country drop-down list (dependent list) as we created the region list (main list) at the beginning.

You can make a copy above Google Sheet from this link.

You can apply the dependent dropdown list to only one cell using this method. If you want to apply the dependent dropdown list in multiple rows, you may read; “Multi-Row Dependent Dropdown List in Google Sheets“.

Wrapping Up

In this tutorial, I showed you how to create a dependent drop-down list, which is dynamically populated based on the selection of another drop-down list on Google Sheets. This will be helping you to create Google Sheets data entry form or interactive dashboards to visualize your data.

However, this method cannot be applied to multiple rows. If you want to create a multi-row dependent dropdown list in Google Sheets, you can learn it from here.