Following Debra's instructions step by step will give you what you need.

You can drill down several levels using her methods.

As far as what you are doing wrong...............difficult to see from here.

How are you creating the lists? From a range or typing directly into the source
dialog?

How are you naming your lists?

How do you enter the listnames into the source dialog?

Must be preceded by an = sign like =MyList


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Tue, 2 Jan 2007 08:55:00 -0800, premierbmwagve
wrote:

Having read the following posts - I thought it would be easy to have 5
categories with up to 30 items in each sub category. Please help... the
first column and categories work fine, but the sub-set does not. Some rows
do not display a menu and if they do they are not the corresponding items. I
have changed names etc to no avail. I cannot see what I am doing wrong....

"I think Dependent Lists will meet your requirements.

See Debra Dalgleish's website for instructions:
http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal02.html

Does that help?
***********
Regards,
Ron

XL2002, WinXP

"scott56hannah" wrote:

I want to be able to drive the selection by Data Validation Lists from the
selection of one list - eg category.....following selection of an item in
that list.....the secondary list is populated with valid sub-categories only
for that category.....is there anyway to do this using validation lists or is
another approach needed ?"