We’ve seen a few different types of data validation instead of Excel.
Little picklists dropdown lists that the users can choose from.
We did that on the make column and we did a decimal range value.
Now we saw that if you put something in there that doesn’t fall within the criteria of the validation, you get an error message.
Just to remind us, I dropped down in the cell B21, I am typing with error spelling “Frd”:
The value doesn’t match the validation restrictions the find in the cell.
Little error message that’s generated by the data validation command.
That’s a nice error message but I don’t think it’s very descriptive.
It’s not very user friendly it really doesn’t tell me what I did wrong at least directly little a little more indirect I guess not as intuitive.
What I want to do here is customize the error message that’s presented when you put something that’s incorrect into a column that has data validation on it.
Highlight the cells that I want to modify from B4 to B30, that’s the range that I applied this to before.
You want to select your exact same range. I’m going to go back up to Data tab, down back to data validation data validation. Earlier we were messing with the Settings tab:
That’s where you set up your criteria for your data validation.
Right next door we got two other tabs, let’s jump over to the third tab Error alerts.
Here we get to customize the error message. And this is pretty neat.
You can a little bit more descriptive a little more user friendly.
Let the users know what they need to do in order to fix the issue.
This is actually two things that deals with the data validation box that opens up on your screen:
1 – It’s an icon.
Click on the dropdown there’s three options there and you can see that there’s different icons, that present themselves but it’s not only an icon. Once they get the error you’ll recall that defaults.
2 – The Title and messenger
Example: Warning, you must pick a value from the drop down menu.
Then Click OK.
Now you can test again the alert:
But then they have an option to continue, Yes or No. In this case it’s validating the data but it allows the user just still press forward with that incorrect value. Try this out customizing their message.
We want to be as direct as short and direct to the point let the users know what they did wrong how they can fix it.