Larilyn's Tip of the Week:   Microsoft Excel - Filtering

Have you ever found yourself working in an Excel spreadsheet that has hundreds, or maybe even thousands of rows?  

It can be very overwhelming.

And for me, I usually need all of the information, but not necessarily all at one time.  

For example, if I were the new headmaster at Hogwarts, I may want to look at different things with my students.  I might want to look at students and their GPA's in each house so I can let each advisor know which of their students might need help.  So I don't want all of the students on the list at once, just one house at a time.  However, I also don't want to just delete anyone off the list, because they are still students and I might want the information for the future.

So I start by making the columns able to be filtered.  I do this by selecting entire the top row and then going over to the Editing section of the Menu and click on the drop down for the Sort & Filter option.  Then you select Filter.

This will turn the top row of each column into a drop down menu.

You can then choose what to filter.   So if I want to see just one House - I would select the drop down for the House column.

You see at the bottom that you can select either all the houses, or multiple but not all, or even just one.  You just put a check mark next to the ones you want to include in the filter.  I want to start with the students in Gryffindor, so I check that box.

Once you select what you want filtered, hit OK and you will only see those have been filtered on the list.

I can then do whatever I want, just with this filtered list.  I can sort by GPA, or by name.  Figure out what I need.  Then I can just go back to the House filter and change which House has a check mark, and my list will re-filter based on that.  It makes it easy to go between different sets of information quickly!

So hopefully this helps in your data refining needs!