In Excel, How do I ....

Factual Questions
1

In Excel, I want a warning or caution message posted every time someone makes an entry into a cell.

I am placing an excel file on a shared directory here at the office, and people can go in and make additions, BUT THEY ALWAYS screw up, or forget the parameters. I want to back it up with a fat ol’ warning message. How to do???

(Disclaimer: I checked basic resources)

2

I’m assuming you actually want the users to be able to edit the worksheet, or else you could just set a password for that sheet.

Method #1:

Select the Data menu, then Validation. The drop-down list in the pop-up box shows you the type of data entry it can validate – e.g. whole numbers, date formats and so on. You can set a custom advisory message to appear when the cell is selected and another to appear if the input doesn’t validate.

For text lists you can set a range of values that will be accepted by typing them into a range of cells (horizontal or vertical, on this or any other worksheet in the workbook) – e.g. “Yes”,“No”,“N/A”. Select List as the type of data validation required, then highlight your range of acceptable values to indicate what Excel should compare against.

Method #2:

If you purely want an advisory message, right-click on the cell and select Insert Comment from the pop-up menu. This will create a little pop-up text box in the cell (indicated by a red triangle in the corner of the cell).

3

mattk’s advice is spot on. Just one other thing:

Depending on your version of Excel, you may not be able to select a range of cells that exist on a different sheet for use in your Validation. At least I can’t do this in Excel 2000.

4

Thanks.

Good info!