Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES 8.2 Dropdown List Fill from a spreadsheet

Question

I am a new user to Adobe LiveCycle Designer and have created a form which a manager is required to fill out for each of their employees.
I would like to create a drop-down object which will contain the name of the employees, so the manager can just pick the employee from a dropdown list and then fill out the evaluation.  We have over 1000 employees, so I don't want to type them in one by one.
Please let me know how to link the list of employees to this form from another source. 
I can put the list of employee names into an Excel spreadsheet or an Access Database.
I have tried following information posted in different places in the web, but I must be doing something wrong??
I would appreciate a step by step guide of instructions to help me accomplish this task.
Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Answer 1

Select the Drop Down object and add a sample name thru the object UI. Now view the "XML Source" TAB, it shows xml code similar to the image.
Now need to prepare all the names from the excell, place all names in one column of excell and copy paste the <text> and </text> nodes to the names(hopefully each column at a time). now need to copy all together and prepare final version to copy notepad (may require some replace all with spaces to format properly) then from notepad only update the above xml source . while going to design view it may pop-up warning message of changed xml, and click yes, now all names should be present in the dropdown. Hope this works.All we are doing here the form design is from "XML Source" tab insted of adding one by one from the object from design view.