Need lots of help with customer look up workbook

[JessicaPamer]

Hi, all! I have been banging my head against the wall for so stinking long on this one and I need some major help... keep in mind, I took an excel class for beginners, so please make sure to dumb things down to me if you have a solution to this :) 

I am trying to create a workbook for my customer database with contact info and addresses, with each tab being the name of each company... Now, there are multiple brands for each company and I want to be able to search for the managers BY BRAND on the first sheet in the workbook. 

The first page in my workbook was going to be the customer lookup page... at the top I wanted to have a drop down that includes all of the sheet names (which are titled as each company name) then a secondary drop down menu that will show a dropdown list of all of the brands depending on the company chosen in drop down 1.

To hopefully make it more clear, to use the master lookup sheet you would select the company from the drop down, then select the brand from the drop down list based on the company you've selected.... from there, there will be a field that will show the main contacts for each brand (general manager, brand manager, purchasing manager, purchasing assistant) and their contact info along with any important notes on the brand that will be typed in each brand's sheet... I also want to add that I need to be able to easily add more brands and companies to these drop down lists as we win more business.

Hopefully I haven't lost you yet...

I know how to create the first drop down (I think) but I get really confused on where to go from there for the second drop down and all videos and tutorials I'm watching are either not doing what I'm trying to do or they are confusing the heck out of me.

Please help!

Signed,

My Head Hurts

[#2]

@JessicaPamer 

I"m attaching a demo spreadsheet I created some time ago with dependent or cascading drop downs, just to illustrate how it's possible. Maybe you can follow the example and implement whatever would be comparable in your situation. If not, perhaps you could come back and either attach a copy of your workbook OR post a copy of it--rendered anonymous, so there are no real companies or names of real people--post a copy of it in Google Drive or on OneDrive.

So far as design is concerned, I would strongly suggest you try to create a single database of ALL your customer companies, instead of separate tabs for each. Just add a column to the table to represent the company. 

Attached is the cascading drop down demo,

[#3]

@mathetes 

Thanks so much! I'll dig into this tomorrow and let you know how it goes!!