For most people, Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets is the tool for compiling information about customers, products, sales revenues and other data. But when the volume of data recorded in a single sheet performs a multitude of columns or rows, it can be difficult to sort them efficiently. Thus, to identify your top ten customers of a specific region in the past six months, you could spend a long time looking in the data entries. Fortunately, Excel provides a function called Auto Filter that is easy to use to display only what you want to see and hide the rest. Filtering does not alter in any way your data. Once you remove the filter, all your data reappears exactly as before. Here's how to use the AutoFilter in Excel.
1. Make sure the data in each column are similar
In your worksheet, the top row of each column should contain a header describing the contents of the column, for example, product no. or customer name.
The data in each column should be the same type. For example, it should not be any text cells in a column of numbers or numbers in a column of dates.
2. Activate the AutoFilter
Now click inside any cell to give, then select AutoFilter as follows:
- In Office Excel 2007, click the Data tab and then in the Sort & Filter, click Filter.
The AutoFilter arrows now appear to the right of each column header.
Note: If you select an entire column instead of a single cell before activating the automatic filter, only the selected column has an AutoFilter arrow.
3. Begin to filter data
Suppose your worksheet contains sales data for customers. Each client entry contains information on the customer's location, products purchased, transaction dates and revenues earned on each sale. Perhaps you want to see sales for the western region customers only? Excel can make your job easier.
To view only the sales of the western region, click the AutoFilter arrow in the header of the column region. When you click an AutoFilter arrow, a list appears. This list contains all the entries in the column, sorted alphabetically or numerically, so you can quickly find the desired item. In this case, you scroll to east, then click on this entry.
When you click on West, Excel hides all the rows of the worksheet except those that contain this word in this column.
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