Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Using Excel Input Messages to Guide Users”.
In this article, we’re going to look at excel input messages if you ever create a spreadsheet or a workbook that you share with other people you’re going to want to know this information, because it’s going to help you to guide the user in how to better use Your spreadsheet and to do it in a gentle way, so here i have a spreadsheet with some sales data and i’ve set up an index and match situation here so that the user of this spreadsheet can simply type in a product category. Let’S say books tap, enter and then type the month. Let’S say july, tap enter again and then it produces the amount of sales of books in july. You can see that that number checks out as we look over here in the data, so this is working well. But what if i wanted to gently guide the user into being more likely to use this index and match correctly? One way to do that would be to use excel input messages and it’s quite simple to do.
I’M going to start by clicking here on cell j3 and then i’m just going to go up here to the data tab and in the data tools group. I’M going to look for data validation. Now the text doesn’t fit for me because of the screen size that i have and the way excel is set up. But if i put my mouse here, you’ll see that this is the data validation tool and i’ll just click on data validation.
It brings up this pop-up and normally we use data validation to restrict what a user can put into a cell and it’s very powerful in that way. If you want to learn more about that, please watch my other videos on data validation, but here is where we’ll find input message, rather than restrict what the user can put in the cell. Sometimes we just want to gently nudge them in the right direction. So, to do that input messages are great by default. This option is checked for me, show input message when cell is selected, and then here i just put in the title and then the message itself of what i want the viewer to see when they click in cell j3, i’ll just repeat: what’s in cell i3 in This case product category and then for input message, i’ll put something like simply type the product category here not case sensitive press enter when you’re done and to save me a little time, i’m just going to click and drag to highlight that and i’ll copy it. I just used ctrl c to copy it, i’ll click. Ok, and now, when i click away, it looks like nothing has changed. It doesn’t look like there’s any sort of message associated with j3. I can just keep using the spreadsheet as i need to, but if i decide to click here to put in a product category a helpful input message, pops up and then i can just enter the information that i’m looking for now. I want to do a similar thing for cell j4, so i click on j4 data data validation, input message, i’ll just paste in the same message as before, but this time i’ll change the word product to month.
I still need the user to press enter when they’re done here in the title i’ll just title it month, click, ok and now i have two different input messages in my excel spreadsheet: each one guiding the user on how to enter better information. So i like to think of input messages in excel as being kind of like comments or notes that are left on the spreadsheet, but in this case they only appear when they’re needed and right in the very moment when they can help. I hope you can see how useful these input messages can be in excel thanks for watching. I hope you found the tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow and subscribe, and when you do, please click the bell so you’ll be notified. When i post another video, if you’d like to support my channel, consider clicking the thanks button below the video or you could support me through my patreon account, or by buying channel merch and you’ll, see more information about those options in the description below the video.
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