MESSIEST SPREADSHEET MISTAKE
In this video, discover the messiest mistake commonly made in spreadsheets and learn how to fix it using data validation to keep your data organized and accurate.
Here's the messiest mistake you're making in spreadsheets, and it's happening even before you do anything in your sheet, and it happens to every single sheet you're doing. So what's going on is you start a sheet and you put in data and it gets messy, or you put in data , other people put in data , data gets in there. I'm gonna explain to you why it's messy from the get-go and what you're missing. So what's going on is there is no fix to this mistake. That is font, that is size, row size, column size, nothing. The mistake you're making is not using data validation . Now, let me explain a little bit about this.
We can be using spreadsheets for CRMs, we can be using them for just a little bit of data entry, we can be using them to do project management, whatever it is. Often, we're going to have one of two things: dates or numbers, and we're going to have, like, some qualitative data , some l- data we need to select it from a list.
But if we just type in anything, we're gonna get anything. If you allow people to type in anything, they will type in anything. But I'm gonna fix this mistake right now with some data validation , and it's going to feel absolutely magical.
I'm gonna add a dala- data validation rule. I'm gonna say the criteria is, is valid date. That's all I'm gonna do.
The other way we do data validation is if there's some text, and we want to select text from a certain select set of texts.
And also, one extra benefit of having this data validation be a dropdown is if I start typing Kermit… Oh, my God, it's right there.
If you don't like this pill, which I personally, as an old man of spreadsheets, I don't like it one bit, but I do understand that some people love it. But you don't have to have it. You can click this Edit button, and you can say, "Hey," down here, Advanced Options , "I actually want to display it as an arrow."
However, let me say one thing, is that data validation means that we will validate the format . We will not make sure that your data is correct.