Well, most of the time i end up getting some questions from my brother on how to do some work in Microsoft Office etc.. Being a Software Engineer , i sometimes struggle to answer immediately and thus decided to start a series of post on the features that demonstrates the features or tricks on Microsoft Office or Windows 7 , enabling me to know more about the inside features or hidden tricks of the products that does not relate to Visual Studio .

Here’s one for the day .

If you are doing some data entry in the Excel and end up entering invalid data in to the cell , here’s a nice tip on how to validate the cell of the sheet accordingly in Excel 2007 .

This feature will restrict the user from entering a invalid value (Data) in to the Cell and ensuring the users that the document data is valid .

I have earlier blogged about how to create a DropDown in Excel , here’s a little further explaination of the validation feature .

Here’s a little hint

• Select the cell you wish to validate ..
• Click the Data Validation Button . You can find it in the Data Tab as described in the screenshot below .

• This should open up a Data validation Dialog box .We will assume that the cell needs to accept the values only from 1 to100 , so it needs to be validated only between these values
• Click the settings tab  , The validation Criteria can be selected by specifying the Data type .We select “Decimal” as said before the minimum value here will be 1 and Maximum value will be 100  and Click ok

• Now enter the Data to the cell for which the Validation was applied .For example , we enter an invalid data ( 109 ) .This will immediately show the Error Message that “The Value you entered is not valid”.