All the samples reference specific cells
https://demos.telerik.com/kendo-ui/spreadsheet/validation
The need is to be able to define validation for columns in the sheet to enforce a template... the data isn't being manually created with the sheet. I feel like most of the samples (all?) seem to be setup with creating the row\cell on init, and that's valid for like template\header\footer setup but not real-world data usage.
sheet.range("A2:A40").validation({ dataType: "custom", from: "SEARCH(\"@\")", allowNulls: true, type: "warning", messageTemplate: "Invalid email" });