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filtering is a great feature of Excel
that gives you a lot of control over
which parts of your worksheet are
displayed you can use it to show only
the information you need or find
something specific while hiding the rest
of the data temporarily now it's
important that you have a header row
because the filtering tools 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 of the filters to simplify it
first go to the data tab and click the
filter command and you'll see these
drop-down arrows added to your header
row these are what you'll use 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 uncheck this box to
quickly des elect everything then check
laptop and projector 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 another
filter to a different 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
then click OK to get rid of any filter
just click the icon again and select
clear filter so that's how you do simple
filtering and now let's look at some
more advanced techniques using the same
menu we can also 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 enter that
here Excel will look for a match
anywhere in these cells and then list
only those results below to apply the
filter just click OK
for a little more control you can use
text filters instead you can access
these from the same menu under text
filters here you can filter information
that fits more specific criteria for
example cells that contain a certain
number of characters or data that
doesn't contain a word that you specify
in this example we're going to choose
does not contain and then enter laptop
to exclude anything that contains this
word including laptops and laptop travel
bags
click OK and Excel will refill Terr the
data next let's say I only want to show
items where the ID number is between
3000 and 6000 I can click the drop down
arrow and go to number filters there are
a lot of different options here but for
what I need I'm going to choose between
now I can type in whatever values I want
in these two fields so this will show
rows that are greater than or equal to
3000 and less than or equal to 6000
click OK and now all of these values are
between 3000 and 6000 date filters are
really cool because they can display
data from a certain time period such as
last year next quarter between two dates
and more in this example I'd like to
find out which items were checked out
this week all you have to do is go to
date filters and you'll find many
options to choose from
I'll select this week
at this point we have three different
filters applied to the worksheet so it's
filtering out most of the items and just
showing the ones that meet all of the
criteria if you'd like to remove any of
the filters you can clear them one by
one like I showed you before or you can
turn off filtering altogether just click
the filter command again as you can see
filtering can narrow things down really
quickly and it gives you so many
different options you can probably find
a use for it with any worksheet
you