Linked Combo Boxes or Combo Box within a Combo Box?

[chibicere]

Hello All,

This is probably dumb newbie question, so apologies in advance.

I have a database of companies, and I am trying to create a field for each company called "Locations of Interest." There are tons of potential locations (basically every country in the world and every state in the US) so I would like a way to potentially sub-divide them so that the combo box list doesn't have hundreds of countries that the user would need to scroll through.

Ideally I would like to keep all the locations in a single "locations of interest" field so that it's easy to search using a basic filter. I plan on using a combo box linked to a separate table so that multiple values can be selected. Is it possible to do some kind of drop-down combo box that starts out with just general locations such as "Europe, North America," etc and then each of those could be either selected (which automatically selects all countries inside of them) or expanded into a list of countries within each continent via a sub-combo box of some sort? I know I can have sub-datasheets within a table, could this be utilized to make such a combo box work?

If this is too complicated for a simple combo box, do you think it could be done with a form/query and then somehow transferred into a single "locations of interest" field for each company?

Thanks for your help!

 

[pbaldy]

Is this what you're looking for?

http://www.baldyweb.com/CascadingCombo.htm

 

[chibicere]

Kind of...the problem with the cascading boxes is that the options in the second are limited to what you select in the first, so if I had a company that was interested in say France and Mexico, in the first level of combo boxes I would want to select Europe and the second level select France, but then I would be unable to also select Mexico because it would be under "North America" for the top combo box.

I think what might be simplest is one large combo box with all locations in it but that is somehow expandable/collapsible based on groupings so it's easier to scroll through. Is this possible?

Thanks!