Page 132 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

114 Data Entry 101
Figure 1-14 shows you what happens in the spreadsheet after you close
the Data Validation dialog box. Here, you see the pop-up menu (with a list
of cities taken from the cell range A2:A6) as it appears when you click the cell’s new pop-up button. In this figure, you can also see the input List Entry message box that I created for this cell by using the options on the Input Message tab of the Data Validation dialog box. Note that you can reposition this message box (officially known as a comment box) so that it’s close to the cell but doesn’t get in the way of selecting an entry — simply drag the com- ment box with the mouse pointer.
Figure 1-15 demonstrates what happens if you try to input an entry that isn’t on the drop-down list. For this figure, I deliberately disregarded the input instructions and typed Boston as the location. As soon as I clicked the Enter button on the Formula bar, the custom alert dialog box (which I named Not On the List!) appears. I created this alert dialog box by using the options located on the Error Alert tab of the Data Validation dialog box.
Figure 1-14:
Selecting a city from the custom drop-down list.