That's the weakness of data validation. It won't work when doing those
operations. I don't know of any way to correct that. Perhaps an event macro
that would pop a message box but I don't know how to go about that.

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Illya Teideman" wrote in message
...
The data validation solution works well as long as I am manually entering
the
data. Any ideas how I can maintain the validation rules when copying and
pasting from another external sheet?

"T. Valko" wrote:

This will allow only A-Z, a-z, 0-9:

=SUM(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),CHAR(ROW(INDIRECT("65:90" ))),"")))+SUM(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(ROW(INDIRECT("48:57"))),"") ))=LEN(A1)

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Illya Teideman" wrote in
message
...
Is there an easy way of restricting the data that can be entered into a
cell
so that only characters that are in the range A to Z a to z 0 to 9 are
valid.
i.e !"£$%^&*()-_ etc etc are not allowed? Might also need space to be
an
allowed character, not sure yet.