Performing a Secondary Filter Selection

SOMETIMES FILTERING data for one criterion is not enough. The sample worksheet you’ve seen earlier in this chapter reflects the grade point averages (GPA) of the third grade students in three classes. If you wanted to calculate the GPA of girls, you could apply a filter on the Gender column. But what if you wanted to see the GPA of only the girls in Mr. Smith’s class? In this instance, you would need to apply a secondary filter.

The secondary filter starts with the data you already filtered and further reduces the number of records to review. You are not limited to applying two filters; you can apply as many filters to your data as you feel are necessary. Apply secondary filters by following these steps.

1.	Choose Data > Sort & Filter > Filter to turn on the AutoFilter feature.
2.	Click the filter arrow for the column you will filter first.
3.	Click the Select All option to remove the check marks from all of your data points and then apply the first filter. In Figure 8-11, the first filter was applied to the Teacher column to select all of Mr. Smith’s students. Figure 8-11. The first filter selects all of Mr. Smith’s students.
4.	Click the filter arrow for the next column you will filter and choose your filter criteria. In this example, you filter the Gender column to show only females (see Figure 8-12). Notice that both the Teacher and the Gender columns now show a filter indicator instead of the filter arrow. Figure 8-12. Two filters were applied to this worksheet. [View full size image]