8. Filtering Data

PICTURE YOURSELF AT A RESTAURANT. You’ve just sat down and are looking at a menu filled with dozens of food choices. How do you decide what to eat? First, you know that your allergies mean you will avoid all seafood. Next, knowing you had pasta last night, you don’t feel like eating pasta tonight, so you can rule out those options. You had a big lunch and don’t want something heavy for dinner as well, so you avoid the red meat choices. Now, you are looking at chicken and a couple of vegetarian options. Making your decision from this more limited selection is much easier. This decision-making process is an example of filtering.

Excel’s AutoFiltering feature works in the same way; it provides you with a method of filtering out, or temporarily hiding, the data that you don’t need to see. None of your data is deleted, but you are able to see only those records that are important to you at any given time. A bookstore manager can filter her sales data to see only the nonfiction sales for the month. The accounts receivable manager at your doctor’s office could filter out all patients who paid in full during their visit and see only those patients who still owe money.

This chapter shows you how you can use the Filter command in Excel to easily manage the data in your worksheets.