No, it's certainly not. Basically even if you set data validation to not
accept blank entries, as long as you never click in one of those lists, Excel
does not check to see that you've entered information into those. So a
programming solution is pretty much the only way to go.

You could even dispense with the safety valve in the _BeforeClose() event
with a little trickery - I've done this before in similar situations. We
could put code in there that looks for a particular word or phrase in a
specific cell on a specific sheet and if that is there, then go ahead and
close the workbook without checking to see if the lists have been populated -
and erase the word/phrase in the process. That allows you to set up a
"clean" sheet and save it out for distribution and lets you do away with the
safety valve option that they could use to close the workbook without
completing it also.

"showsomeidnow" wrote:

thanks all for your help - i now know it's not a simple 'tick box'
option available in excel. appreciate all the advice.