Easily assign options to multiple products

[cqpbert]

I have several products that all have the same color options. The colors are being updated often. The issue is I miss some of the products when updating the colors. I have already decided to create a document displaying the colors instead of adding now pics to each product. Now I want to find a better way for the customers to pick the color.

In my limited coding mind, I want the option to be from a pick list drop down, that the list comes from a master list that I can keep up to date.

Does this question make sense? Sometimes I leave out vital information because I know what I want to do, but get tongue tied trying to type it out.

Edited May 1 by cqpbert

[cqpbert]

While I did not find an easy way to do this really, I did discover option sets. It seems to me this gives me the ability to add to the set and it will get added to everything that uses the set. So that works fine for what I need.

It would be really cool if we could attach a small icon to the attribute such as a color swatch, but that is likely way too much I assume.

[cqpbert]

Thanks Amy,

It sounds like you are saying I can have variants that differ depending on what option is chosen? If so this sounds very exciting for my future.

Right now I want to simply be able to show a color ICON next to the option in the list. So for example if the option is color, I want to have a swatch of the color next to the text. Or even better, have a group of small color blocks that can be chosen instead of a drop down list. This way my customers could just click the color they want and not need to know the name of it.