Drop-down fields with hundreds or thousands of values can be difficult to navigate. Scrolling through long lists is tedious, and while desktop users can type to jump to values, few know this feature exists and it doesn’t work on mobile devices.
The solution: add a text field that filters the drop-down. Users type their search term, then open the drop-down to see only matching values. This makes large lists manageable on any device.
Example: Searching names
Here’s an example app with 100 names:
The drop-down shows only names matching the text entered in the search field.
How it works
This uses the FILTER function. Here’s the formula for the Values property of the drop-down:
Names is a named value containing the full list:
Case-insensitive search
For case-insensitive filtering, use LOWER to convert both the search term and the names to lowercase:
Now searching for “alice”, “ALICE” or “Alice” all produce the same results.
Note: This technique requires named values, which are not available in our Starter plans. You can work around this by directly embedding the array formula instead of using a named value reference.