Maybe this will point you in the right direction.

http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal02.html

Hope this helps
Rowan

ben h wrote:
Hi,

This is for our timesheets. We have two lists that I'm interested in
speeding up: client list, job activity list.

Clients are represented by their names (easy so far), e.g. NPR, NASA,
Orange...

Job activities are represented by the first letter of the client name,
then some numeric codes, e.g. N05015-100, N05015-200, N05016-100,
N05016-110, N05016-120, N05016-130, O05019-200. There are many job
activities to each client.

These lists are in my worksheet:

Clients Jobs
Alpha A05001-100
Beta A05001-200
NPR A05001-300
NASA A05001-310
Orange A05001-320
Zylex A05001-330
A05001-340
A05001-400

and so on.

The timesheet has one cell for the client, then the next (adjacent) cell
is for the relevant client job for that entry. How can i make the second
cell only display the relevant job numbers for the client? I really
don't care if for client NPR all the jobs for NPR and for NASA are
displayed; that's loads better than nearly a hundred jobs displaying for
every client. In other words i want to filter on the first letter.

Does this make sense? Can it be done with some sort of function in the
data validation dialog? Will it need a VBA solution?

Thanks for any help!

Ben