Recommendations for dropdown menu items that are too wide?

I realise I'm fairly late to this question, but I've been hunting for an answer and I may have found a fairly elegant solution.

Have a look here:

• http://www.getharvest.com/blog/2009/12/dropdown-problems-on-internet-explorer/
• http://www.dougboude.com/blog/1/2008/05/Viewing-Option-Text-in-IE7-thats-Wider-than-the-Select-List.cfm

The first link talks about a couple of solutions before recommending a solution based on the second link.

The idea is that on click, you change the width of the <select> tag such that it is big enough to show the full text of the options. By keeping the <select> tag inside a div with overflow set to 'hidden', it doesn't screw with the rest of the page.

Try it out - it's a pretty good solution.

Truncation with tooltip would be my choice....

The last time i had to do that i used a telerik control, which was quite UI rich.

I agree with GordonB regarding truncating the options. Excessively long options can be hard to read, and as you mentioned it looks horrible.

If your dropdown is populated from user input, however, I'd restrict the length. What can be said with 15 words should be said with 5 ... if it can't, then perhaps a dropdown isn't your best option.

For example, if your options are the titles of research papers and their authors, you can probably abbreviate them down to a few key words ("String Theory and You [Brown 2008]"). On the other hand, if the options themselves differ by only a few words and lose meaning if they are truncated (e.g. a list of options like "Peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich with carrot sticks and soy milk" and "Peanut butter and boysenberry jelly sandwith with carrot sticks and 2% milk") maybe you would be better served by displaying all the options sequentially, accompanied by a checkbox or radio button as appropriate.

(If you're using ASP.NET, basically I'm saying using a repeater instead of a DropDownList)

This second approach might also allow you to incorporate other elements that you wouldn't be able to in a dropdown. Take a look at this Amazon search result page for ideas.