InfoPath Dev

First off I should mention I am new to Sharepoint and Infopath. I have had some formal sharepoint training but am figuring out infopath on my own.  

I've been working on an infopath form for work and have ran into an issue I was hoping for some help with. The form I am creating is on sharepoint and I am using a sharepoint library to populate my form.

I currently have a dropdown list setup where when a coworker picks a "topic". A conditional statement makes a seperate dropdown box for "Subtopic" appear. I have 1 "topic" dropdown and 13 "subtopic" dropdown boxes that correspond to each topic within the "topic" dropdown box.

Is it possible to link the 13 subtopic dropdown boxes so that all ouput choices appear  in a single column.

Is there another way to do this other than dropdown boxes?

I need to build reports each quarter and I would prefer to be working with 1 subtopic output column rather than 13.  

Thank you for your help

Hi - What version of SharePoint are you using? Is this a browser form or filler?

I don't know what you are referring to when you say "output" - is this the subtopic dropdowns?

At any rate, if you are NOT using browser forms in SharePoint 2007, I'd suggest that you only need a single subtopic dropdown, with a filter on the data to only display items for the selected topic - here's a tutorial on that (for an early version of IP, but still relevant).

Hilary,

Thank you for the response. I am currently in Infopath 2007. I have it set up to open in the browser but it always opens in infopath. I am assuming that means filler? Still new to the terminology, I found your chart you posted back in 08.

As for output I mean that the information the user selects is stored in a different table then which populates the dropdown. Output for me refers to the information that gets stored after a user fills out a form and hits submit.

I will try the filter function, I was unaware that this was possible. I will write back with a status update next week.

Thank you again

Well - the reason I was asking about versions is that you can't use a filter on a list box in a form in the browser in SharePoint 2007 - just something you need to be aware of.

Hilary,

Thank you again for your help. This process was exactly what I needed to do. I was also able to find a video showing how to utilize this technique with sharepoint.

So thank you again