Spreadsheets are a wonderful way to store and analyse large amounts of data. There are many ways that you can sort, extract and display pieces of information. One of the easiest, if not THE easiest to use is the Filter.
To apply a filter
In both Microsoft Excel and Google Documents Spreadsheets filters can be added to a document by placing your cursor in the header row of your document and pressing the “filter icon”.
In Microsoft Excel:
The Excel filter icon looks like this:
and can be found on the Home toolbar:
In Google Documents Spreadsheet:
In Google the filter looks like:
and can be found on the toolbar here:
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TO USE FILTER
Once filters have been applied each cell in the header row will have an icon that looks like
To filter, select the field (column) you want to filter by, click the Filter icon in its cell, and tick or untick everything until only the things you want to filter by are ticked.
Click OK and only the items you left ticked should be visible.
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TO REMOVE A FILTER
Often you’ll want to filter more than one field. It’s always easy to tell which fields have a filter applied because the filter icon changes depending on what has been done.
In Microsoft Excel:
In Microsoft Excel, the filter icon in a column will change to show you if a filter has been applied or the document has been sorted by a field. The icons you will see in Excel documents are:
In Google Documents Spreadsheet:
In Google spreadsheet, if a filter has been applied the icon changes to:
So that’s pretty much it for filters. The number 1, most important thing you need to remember is that when entering your data, you need to be consistent in your fields so you can easily filter by them. Of course, if you haven’t been, you can always use the filters to select the common ones and fix them.
If you have any questions about using filters in either Google Spreadsheets or Microsoft Excel, please ask them in the comments.
