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 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 up,
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.
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.
Then click OK.
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 OK.
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.
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 3000 and 4000.
I'm just going to clear these filters.
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.
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,
and your spreadsheet will go back to showing everything.
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 spreadsheet.