Question

I have made an excel sheet which is generated by Java. The cells can only accept certain values, depending on data validation done against lists on a separate sheet.

This all works great, but if a user copies some values from another cell and pastes it into the cell it avoids validation… is there any way to prevent this?

Answer 1

You can do this by setting data format for that cell.

style = wb.createCellStyle();
style.setDataFormat(wb.createDataFormat().getFormat("0.000%"));

which will percentage value.
For documentation goto:
Apache HSSF Doc