I don’t know about you, but I’m always impressed when I’m filling out a contact form online, enter in my phone number 5551238776 and see it transformed to (555) 123-8776.
It’s not much, but it shows that the form is designed with the user and aesthetics in mind.
You can do the same in Excel!
By using custom cell formatting, you can transform a ten-digit number into phone number format. Then you can use data validation to ensure you’ve got exactly ten numbers.
It’s not much work, but enhances both the reliability and the beauty of your workbook.
George, nice work. Another way is use the following data validation settings:
Allow: Text Length
Data: equal to
Length: 10
Also, you can even customize the error message for erroneous input to say something like “Please Enter a 10 digit number”
Cheers!
Oh, thanks for pointing out the text length constraint, I was thinking strictly numerically 🙂 Yes that is prettier than my method. Thanks for that one!