Dropdowns allow your users to choose form a pre-defined range of values. This can be really useful to make sure that everything is spelt correctly.

For example, suppose you wanted to have a “Legal structure” field on a client, that contained whether a client is a limited company, a sole trader, etc. If you have this as a text field, and ask the user to enter a value then chances are different people will enter it in different ways:

• limited company

• Ltd company

• Company

• Ltd Co.

• Limited co.

• Partnership

• P/S

• P'ship

• Prtnrs

and so on.

This would make sorting / filtering clients difficult. In this case, it would be a great idea to have a dropdown that contained just the values you want to accept, for example:

• Sole trader

• Partnership

• LLP

• Limited company

• PLC

• Trust

Now the users can only choose one of these values and not enter anything else. This makes filtering very easy because in the filter you have only the exact number of values that you accept.