With your list in A1 (and the returned value going into A1), you could use:

=VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!A:B,2,0)

where Sheet2 contains all the states and their populations (col. A = state,
col. B = population).

HTH
Jason
Atlanta, GA

"Vic" wrote:

I've done some basic spreadsheets in the past but I'm stumped with this: I
have constructed a dropdown menu of the US States names and now I want
whoever selects a particular state to see that states population appear in
another cell.