Defining data validation
Data validation is crucial for your business: if data is misaligned, dirty, or simply missing key pieces, it can rapidly become useless and even dangerous for your business. Would you drive a car without the lights on? I don't think so.
That's why the Salesforce platform delivers different ways to provide data validation on your CRM. Here, I cite the most often used methods of data validation:
Field type built-in validation
Field marked as required
Validation rules
Apex triggers / Lightning components
Note
Apex triggers give you the most freedom in defining validation criteria on record creation/update, bringing automation to the next level: it requires strong Apex coding skills though. The same applies to Lightning components, which are used to build user interfaces to deliver highly customized user experiences.
Further reading
We won't cover Apex triggers in this book (as this is a pure coding topic) but if you come from...