One of the most useful and powerful tool in Excel is the Filter. Anyone use it every working day.
How to visualize the filters ?
You know that the filter is ON when you see arrows on the headers of your table.
Activate the Filter
- Select one of the cells of your table
- Activate the filter in the Data > Filter
- Now you see arrows in the header of your table
Display only a few rows
With the filter you can easily reduce the number of rows visible by selecting only one criterion.
Select one criterion (Filter on one column)
For instance, you might want to select only the rows in the beverages category.
- Click on the arrow containing your criterion (here the column Category)
- Uncheck all items (Select All)
- Select only the item you want (in this case, Beverages)
Only the row containing this criterion is visible but the other rows are not deleted.
Rows are not deleted
When you activate the filter, you can hide the rows not equal to your filter.
As you can see, only the row numbers of the rows containing your filter are visible.
Moreover, the row numbers are blue. This indicates that a filter is active on your table.
Select multiple criteria (Filter on many columns)
You can select as many columns as you want.
For instance, if you want to select men from Germany (DE) and Austria (AT) who have bought from the Grocery category, you can do it like this:
How many rows are returned in your filter
When you activate a filter, you can see how many rows are returned by looking at the bottom left in the status bar
Remove filters
Removing filters is also important to know. And there is a trick to remove easily all the filters of your table.
