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Use Data Validation rules to prevent duplicate entries in a range

Use Data Validation rules to prevent duplicate entries in a range - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

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Use Data Validation rules to prevent duplicate entries in a range

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- [Instructor] Encountering duplicates and lists sometimes is a big problem. And there are two general approaches to dealing with them. One approach by way of conditional formatting allows you to identify where they exist in existing data. And also, if you were using that feature, conditional formatting while putting in new data, it would certainly highlight information, but it doesn't prevent the bad entries. So as viable as that is, and it's worth a look, even better is data validation, which allows us to not only have a rule to prevent duplicate, but also to control the the length of an entry, these IDs that we're seeing on the worksheet here in column D, let's say need to be four characters, not three, not five, but always four. So we could combine that using data validation rules. The conditional formatting rule that's in place in column G was set up very simply. If you click column G and go to conditional…

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