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Advanced Drop-down Lists

Advanced Drop-down Lists is designed to help facilite data entry. With Advanced Drop-down Lists, you may attach to your ACT! fields either:

  • a conditional drop-down list or,
  • a dynamic drop-down list (group names, contact names, company names)

What are conditional drop-down lists?

Conditional drop-down lists are lists which items change depending on another field value.

For instance, let's say you have a "Product" field and a "Product option" field. You want the drop-down list of the "Product option" field to be listing only options related to the product specified in the "Product" field. With Advanced Drop-down Lists, you may create different lists for each product and each list will be displayed only if the corresponding product is displayed in the "Product" field.

 
The "Product" field is set at "Product A". "Product option" dropdown list displays a list of options specific to "Product A"
 
The "Product" field is set at "Product B". "Product option" dropdown list displays a list of options specific to "Product B"

What are dynamic drop-down lists?

These are lists that contain data that is created on-the-fky. With Advanced Drop-down Lists, you may create drop-down lists that contain:

  • the list of your groups;
  • the list of the sub-groups of a group;
  • the list of contacts or companies belonging to a group or a sub-group;

For instance, let's say you want to track who the accountant of your contacts is. You have a field named Accountant. You have a group called Accountants which contains all the accountants in your database. You could set up the Accountant field drop-down list to read the Accountants group, so that it displays the accountants names or company names. The list is dynamic, in the sense that it is always up-to-date without the need to refresh it to include contacts that you may have added to the Accountant groups.

This list displays the names of
all the groups of the database

This list displays the names of
of the contacts in one group

Can I setup an Advanced Drop-down List to include 1000's of contacts?

Yes, although this may affect speed. If it takes too long for the list to load, you may setup your list to not read the data dynamically. In this case, you have the option to create a data file with the contacts names (or company names) so that the program reads the data file instead of querying ACT! This will significantly reduce the loading time. Though this data file will not be updated automatically when a contact is added to the group, a refresh button will be displayed at the bottom of the drop-down list to allow a manual update of the data file.

This list displays the company names of
of the members of one group.
It is not dynamic hence the Refresh button.

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Across this Web site, ACT! and ACT! Premium might be referred to as ACT! or Sage ACT!. Sage ACT! was the product name from 2010 to 2013.

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