Data Validation in Excel

Suppose you work at an organization where you want people to enter specific information in particular columns in an excel sheet, you can restrict users from entering any jargon values in the excel cells. This feature is known as Data Validation. 

Take an instance, you are entering information about people, you are aware that age column will only contain numbers, Name will only contain characters. If someone enters characters in Age column, it will ruin your data. So ensure that, you can put data validation on Name and Age column.

Select the column you want to add data validation, and then click on DATA > Data validation as shown below:

 Whenever users are going to access the columns you can create an input message for the users to make them aware about the data they need to enter

So whenever a user is about to enter data in that column, excel makes the user aware of the data which needs to be entered.

 

You might need to restrict users from entering characters in Age column. For that select the age column,

 click on Data validation >Settings, In allow select whole number, in Data select between 18 to 150 since in many offices a customer needs to be above 18 years of age.

 

In Error Alert, you can write a custom message to stop users from entering jargon values.

 

I tried to write charaacters ds in age column and I got the below error:

Hope this tutorial helps you in understanding data validation in MS Excel. 

Reference: 

Apply data validation to cells. n.p n.p. n.p. <https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Apply-data-validation-to-cells-c743a24a-bc48-41f1-bd92-95b6aeeb73c9>.

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Apply-data-validation-to-cells-c743a24a-bc48-41f1-bd92-95b6aeeb73c9