From the course: Excel 2016: Tips and Tricks

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Ensure unique entries with data validation rules

Ensure unique entries with data validation rules

From the course: Excel 2016: Tips and Tricks

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Ensure unique entries with data validation rules

- [Voiceover] In this worksheet called Data Validation, I'll be putting in some names, I already have some ID numbers, and I want to be sure to keep out duplicate ID numbers. But as you can see from this list already there are some duplicates. Now, one approach is simply to highlight the duplicates. That's not going to help us keep out duplicates. As a reminder, if you click Column B I'm on my Home tab, go to Conditional Formatting, Highlight Cell Rules, Duplicate Values, and we probably would have seen that anyway with our eyes since the list is so short but we see the duplicate values highlighted. We don't really need this feature here, so I'll simply press escape. We might actually want to prevent duplicate entries from going into Column B. Let's get rid of the data. Now, there is a function called COUNTIF. You might be familiar with it. COUNTIF says, I'm looking at a certain location, let's imagine it's going to be Column B, comma, and I want to know how often a certain value…

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