Users entering large amount of text in Subject field on Tasks

[lindat]

Does anyone have problems with users entering large amounts of text into the Subject field on Tasks instead of choosing one of the values in the combo box?  Some of my users are doing this and it makes it very difficult to pull reports.  For instance, instead of choosing "email", someone may put: "sent an email to this person about a meeting we had last thursday.....".  The Subject field is listed as a picklist but on the page layout is actually a combo box that cannot be changed and is a required field so can't be removed from the page.  Now one of my users wants me to replace the values with a whole long list of new values, which is going to compound the problem if I can't require them to choose the values.  Any ideas?  (The head of one of the depts doesn't want to add another field if it can be helped.)

[Peanutman]

Hi Lindat,

What you can probably do is create a Validation Rule which basically states if the value in the Subject field is not equal to the values in your picklist, then kick back an error message stating something like 'Please only select a value from the picklist for this field. All other entries should be put into the comments field'.

Your users will probably not be your friend because of this, but it will make your reporting much better!

Good Luck,

Eric