Creating "nested" or "cascading" Pop-Up Menus in Numbers

Acknowledgement to t quinn who had the original idea and described the steps required to create nested Pop-Up Menus.

A frequently asked question in Numbers is how to create "nested" (or "cascading" or "dynamic") Pop-up Menus, where the menu items in the next Pop-Up Menu depend upon the previous choice.

The short answer is that Numbers does not support that feature. Pop-Up Menus can not alter their menu items dynamically.

A brilliant idea by t quinn gets around this problem:

1. Use a conditional (IF) formula to insert "show" into those table rows that match a previous Pop-Up Menu choice, and then:

2. Use the Filter feature to show only those rows of a table that contain the value "show" to reveal the next relevant Pop-Up Menu.

Suppose that you want to choose an animal (for example, Cat) in the first level of cascading Pop-Up Menus, and then choose a breed or species of that animal (for example Persian) in the second level of cascading Pop-Up Menus.

Start with this table with all cells formatted as Automatic. Type your cascading data to the right in each row.

Select one row at a time and convert the Data Format to Pop-up Menu. Do not include blank cells. Do not select all cells in the table; you want one row at a time!

Delete all columns except for columns A and B.

Select all of column B and delete the contents.

Set the Data Format of column B to Automatic.

Type "Show" (without the quote marks) into B1.

Formula in B2: IF(A$1="Cat","Show","")

Formula in B3: IF(A$1="Dog","Show","")

Formula in B4: IF(A$1="Lizard","Show","")

Now for the Filter:

Or...

All comments welcome.

Regards,

Ian.