filtering is a great feature of Excel
that gives you a lot of control over
which parts of your spreadsheet are
displayed it's a little bit like
outlining and grouping but it's even
more powerful and it actually makes it a
little bit easier to narrow down your
data in different ways now it's
important that you have a header row
because the filters actually get added
to the cells in the header row
in this example I have an equipment
checkout log and there are a lot of
things to keep track of so I'd like to
use some filters to simplify it first go
to the data tab and click the filter
command
you'll see these drop-down arrows added
to your header row
and you'll use these to access all of
the filtering options
here you'll see a list of all of the
different values that appear in this
column I'd like to just view the laptops
and projectors so I'll leave those
checked and uncheck everything else and
then click OK
and now the drop-down arrow has changed
to a different icon to show that there
is a filter in this column
we can narrow down this data even
further by adding a filter to another
column let's filter by the date that the
items were checked out
this shows all of the months that appear
in this column so I'll uncheck the
months that I don't want
you can also click the plus sign next to
the month if you want to filter by the
specific dates
and then click okay
to get rid of the filter just click on
the icon and select clear filter
so that's how you do simple filtering
now let's look at some more advanced
techniques
when you click the drop-down box you can
actually search for values that appear
in this column
in this example a lot of our equipment
is made by a company called saris so if
we type that then the list below it will
only display those items
and then click okay
now let's say that I only want to show
items where the ID number is between
3000 and 4000 I can click on the
drop-down box for this column and go to
number filters
there are a lot of different options
here and I'll click on between
now I can type in whatever values I want
here
so this will show rows that are greater
than or equal to 3000 and less than or
equal to 4000
and now you can see that all of these
values are between 3,000 and 4,000
to clear these filters
now the date filters are really cool
because they can use the current date to
filter data I'd like to find out which
items were checked out this week
if we go to the date filters we have
many different options and I'll select
this week
finally if you'd like to clear all of
the filters and get rid of these
drop-down arrows you can just click the
filter command again
your spreadsheet will go back to showing
everything so you can see how quickly
filtering can narrow things down and it
gives you so many different options you
can probably find a use for it with any
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