Add a tooltip to each cell in your worksheet that you expect someone to enter a value. This provides great context-sensitive help as someone tries to use your worksheet. Episode 382 shows you how.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
Well, last week I was showing you how to use Data Validation to create these worksheets, where people had a drop-down list to choose from, and it was all about kind of restricting what people could enter.
There's a great feature about data validation that I love, and I actually saw this from one of the people on my website.
They sent me this worksheet, and tooltips started popping up as I selected various cells, I’m like “Wow!
That's really helpful, that's really amazing!
I wonder how they did it!” And if you go to the Data Validation page, there's three tabs there.
I don't want to change anything on Settings, I want to continue to allow any value, but on the Input Message, I'm going to provide help to explain what I want.
So you can put a title, “Enter the Price of the Car”, and a little explanation, so, do whatever.
And then what's nice is, as they select the cell, you'll see that we get a tooltip that pops up, that tells them what you're expecting there.
So it almost provides sort of like help as you go along the spreadsheet, as they select each cell, the different tooltip pops up.
And that's all from the Data Validation using the center tab, the Input Message tab.
Great idea if you need to send a worksheet out to someone, and you want to provide context-sensitive help as they select each cell.
Your box pops up, with your message telling them exactly what's put in that cell.
Thought that was a great idea, great way to use something that's usually pretty restrictive, the Validation command to provide something that's actually very, very helpful.
Hey, thanks for stopping by, we'll see you tomorrow for another netcast from MrExcel!
Well, last week I was showing you how to use Data Validation to create these worksheets, where people had a drop-down list to choose from, and it was all about kind of restricting what people could enter.
There's a great feature about data validation that I love, and I actually saw this from one of the people on my website.
They sent me this worksheet, and tooltips started popping up as I selected various cells, I’m like “Wow!
That's really helpful, that's really amazing!
I wonder how they did it!” And if you go to the Data Validation page, there's three tabs there.
I don't want to change anything on Settings, I want to continue to allow any value, but on the Input Message, I'm going to provide help to explain what I want.
So you can put a title, “Enter the Price of the Car”, and a little explanation, so, do whatever.
And then what's nice is, as they select the cell, you'll see that we get a tooltip that pops up, that tells them what you're expecting there.
So it almost provides sort of like help as you go along the spreadsheet, as they select each cell, the different tooltip pops up.
And that's all from the Data Validation using the center tab, the Input Message tab.
Great idea if you need to send a worksheet out to someone, and you want to provide context-sensitive help as they select each cell.
Your box pops up, with your message telling them exactly what's put in that cell.
Thought that was a great idea, great way to use something that's usually pretty restrictive, the Validation command to provide something that's actually very, very helpful.
Hey, thanks for stopping by, we'll see you tomorrow for another netcast from MrExcel!
