Dynamic dropdown list from a linked sheet

Hi @Chetty thanks for stopping by! We don’t currently have a way to connect a list and have it update dynamically, but if you have any use cases you’d like me to share with the product team, I”d be happy to!

Hi @Liz, I work for the National Institute for Health Research (UK) and I have a Typeform set up that allows researchers to view and express an interest in all research studies that are currently taking place. The list of studies changes quite a bit throughout the year and I don’t want to have to continually be updating Typeform when I already have the most up to date list in a spreadsheet.

I also have another Typeform relating to staff feedback when they have supported the research studies. On this form the Staff members change quite often so again it would be super useful if I could link the Typeform options to my spreadsheet where I capture staff information.

Hope this feature can be looked at as I’m sure many users will find it really useful.

Thanks.

@Chetty - as a fellow user, i can’t agree with you more that it would be a fabulous capability. hopefully one day in the near future it will hit the product development list ..

cheers

des

@Chetty thank you! This is really helpful context. I’ve shared it with the product team. 

Hello everyone.
I am having the same problem as @Chetty . I tested with zapier using the action "Update Dropdown, Multiple Choice Or Ranking Question Options". but i couldn't update more than one option.

Does anyone have more experiences with this tool?

thanks!

Hi @sebastiancv I’m not familiar with this in Zapier. Would you mind sharing a screenshot/video of what you’re referencing? It would be good for me to see what’s happening in Zapier!

Hi,

I’ve seen in the docs, you can use a plain text list as the options for a dropdown field. But is it possible to use a custom (remote) source for a dropdown list, rather than static, hardcoded list?

My use case is I want users to choose a ‘thing’ that they’re interested in. This list of ‘things’ is changing regularly (daily/weekly), so a manual update of the form with new data would be susceptible to human error.

I’d considered using the Create API to update the form field when the data changes on my end, just like this post. However, I’d rather it was a ‘pull’ when the form is rendered rather than a ‘push’ when the data changes - I was hoping there would be a more ‘native’ way of doing this.

I’d looked in the docs for things to do with ‘dynamic dropdown’, ‘custom data sources’ or ‘dynamic picklist’ and things like that but couldn’t find anything.

Thanks in advance

Ian

Hi @ediblecode thanks for stopping by! I’ve added your question here where we have the answer.  Let us know if you think of any other questions!

@Chetty just seen you’re at NIHR. I’m at NICE - would love to chat about how you’re using forms etc if you’re happy to share. Can you find me on cross gov slack if you’re on there or LinkedIn please?

I would also be very interested by having the possibility to load dynamic data in my form elements.

For example, when creating a question, having the possibility to post to a custom URL all the custom variables, and retrieve the response back after calculations on our end.

This way, possibilities would be endless.

Just chiming in to say that the functionality described by @Chetty would be tremendously helpful to me. I have a form where multiple choice options for one question are based on previous text answers to another question. I am already sending TypeForm responses to a Google Sheet, and imagine the source for the dynamic options could be either that Google Sheet or the Typeform’s internal Responses API...

+1 for also finding this feature tremendously helpful, I have a form that is sent out every month, and the key to the rest of the automation is a dropdown list, however I don’t want to manually update that manual drop down each time.

+1 

Hope there is already news about this feature? 

Hi all,
maybe this post ist related about this feature in zapier (Update Dropdown, Multiple Choice or Ranking Question Options).

Does anyone use it before? I couldn`t

thanks for any help

Hi Liz,

Here’s what I was planning to do,

I have a dataset of countries, their states and cities … wanted a way to have dynamic dropdowns so that they can select their country, then only options related to their country’s states would be shown in the next drop down and finally cities related to their state would be shown in their next dropdown …. managing this from a google sheet is easier then doing so many logic jumps and maintaining data.

Thanks, @Jayd ! While we don’t have this solution within the Typeform builder, there are quite a few workarounds from the others above that may help you!

Hi! I did it using GSheets > Zapier > Typeform.

Just have the data as X,Y,Z without quotation marks nor {} neither []. Just your data separated with commas and then you get option1,option2,option3 in your Typeform dropdown/multiselect.

Very easy!

@julienwir Thanks for stopping by the typeform! This is an interesting solution - do you mind sharing how you set this up? Are you updating the form constantly from your spreadsheet and Zapier? If you could share a bit more detail, that would be helpful for those looking for a similar solution!