Posted by Jim High
Exported data from Dynamics CRM 2016 into Microsoft Excel has some additional formatting that wasn’t included in previous versions. This is helpful in many cases, but can also present some frustration if you aren’t accustomed to working with that type of table. I talk about how to convert the data from a table to a simple range of cells in a previous post.
One additional annoyance can occur even after converting your data to range, which is click on a cell in your exported dataset. By default every time you click on a cell in that range, it will show you the data validation rules. The problem is that sometimes it covers up information you’re trying to view in adjacent cells shown below. It may also prevent you from entering data in those fields if you are doing some Excel manipulation.
One additional annoyance can occur even after converting your data to range, which is click on a cell in your exported dataset. By default every time you click on a cell in that range, it will show you the data validation rules. The problem is that sometimes it covers up information you’re trying to view in adjacent cells shown below. It may also prevent you from entering data in those fields if you are doing some Excel manipulation.
Fortunately, there is an easy resolution. First, select all of your cells in the worksheet so that the change affects your entire spreadsheet.
Go to the “Data” tab in your ribbon bar, then click on “Data Validation” drop down menu and then “Data Validation…”
In most cases, you’ll get a warning saying the selection contains more than one type of validation. That’s fine since we want to affect them all anyway so click “Ok.” If you don’t want to remove them all, then hit “Cancel” and change your cell selection first.
That will bring up the Data Validation window. You have two options. If you want to just hide the input messages, uncheck the “Show input messages when cell is selected”. If you want to remove the validation altogether and allow you full control of the worksheet, click on the “Clear All” button in the bottom left corner of the window. Once you click “OK” to close the window, all of those annoying popups will be gone.
Remember that cell selection is important. If you fail to select the entire worksheet, then this will only work on the particular cell(s) you have selected. Happy exporting!
