How to Reverse Dropdown Box - Google Sheets

Question

I have a form on my website that users fill out their name, and all their information. When they submit the form, the data goes to a google spreadsheet.

I then have another sheet that has a dropdown box that auto-populates the names (and ID #) from the first sheet. If you click the dropdown box, it lists all the names. When you select a name, the rest of the sheet populates with their info.

This initially worked great, however as I am getting hundreds (maybe thousands) of submissions, my dropdown is getting lots of names and every time I go to select a name, I have to scroll to the bottom of the dropdown to get the recent submissions. I normally only need to access the most recent submissions.

I see potentially three ways of handling this but I do not know how to do any of these:

1. Can I reverse the dropdown data so that it pulls the most recent names from the original data sheet first. OR

2. Another way of doing this is to make so that when someone submits a new submissions, that it adds the new line to the top of the data sheet, not at the bottom. OR

3. I have an ID # with each name (in a different Column). Can I sort the dropdown box by alphabetical order?

Answer 1

Your best bet would be to use either option 1 or 3

For this you should create a helper column using

Option 1: Reverse the dropdown data so that it pulls the most recent names from the original data sheet first.

=SORT(G3:G18,ROW(G3:G18)*N(G3:G18<>""),0)

Option 3: Sort the dropdown box by alphabetical order

`=SORT(G3:G18)` 

(Do adjust the formula according to your ranges and locale)

You can then use the helper column as your drop-down range