WSS - Filtered Drop Down (Workaround)?

Question

Background info - I'm a Business Analyst for a company providing shared cloud solutions to pharma clients. We use Sharepoint to track multiple things such as Action Items, Service Requests, etc.

As an end-user, I don't have developer access, but I have have access to create lists, libaries, etc with Windows Sharepoint Services (not sure of version - 3.0 or 2007?) That said, from doing extensive research I've learned that filtered (cascading) drop-down columns are not part of the product - that figures. Please bare with my newbie post.

Is it possible to work around this issue by using a nested IF-THEN type of statement with a combination of lookup and calculated fields? Here's a basic scenario to illustrate what I'm looking to do:

Custom List 1 (County)
Column 1 (County Name) - with 2 items:
1 = Morris
2 = Essex

Custom List 2 (Town)
Column 1 (County Name) - with 4 items:
1 = Morris
2 = Morris
3 = Essex
4 = Essex

Column 2 (Town Name) - with 4 items:
1 = Parsippany
2 = Randolph
3 = Newark
4 = Caldwell

Using a custom list (based on these lists above) if I choose Morris in one field, can I have the Town field show only the corresponding towns - Parsippany and Randolph?

Answer 1

You can take advantage of the SPServices jquery library on codeplex that will allow you to do such a cascade lookup/filtering... SPServices link here