populating the record picker with a value from a spreadsheet

Just to add to Alex's post above, you would map the Record ID# of the Standard which you say is on your excel sheet into the field [Related Standard] on the Quick Base table of Measurements.  

You'll have to forgive me, I am very new at this and either not understanding or not communicating correctly.

The impression that I get from the original response is that there is no way to connect the tables within Quickbase, that I'd need to export the standards table to a spreadsheet, do all the sorting and parsing manually, then import the resulting spreadsheet to the measurements table.  This would be done once a month and would frankly take more time than just manually entering each of the performance metrics and using the lookup fields to connect it to the standard.

when we say "mapping" the record ID into the related standard field, does this imply that there _is_ a way to import from a spreadsheet and have the imported data lookup information from another table? 

Here is some help text on Relationships.  
https://help.quickbase.com/user-assistance/creating_a_relationship.html

Once you connect a child to a parent record, then you simply lookup any fields you like from the parent down to the children


So yes, you can import an excel sheet and if it has the Key field of the Standards in the import then not only will be import of the measure data be automated, but the lookups of he correct standard will come down from the parent standard table.