Managing Data with Microsoft® Excel

Filtering Data with the AutoFilter

When you're working with a large amount of data, you sometimes want to hide certain records so that you can focus on others. This is called filtering: You filter out the records that you want to ignore.

Excel's worksheets offer two approaches to filtering data: the AutoFilter and the Advanced Filter. (There's nothing really complicated about the Advanced Filter; it just takes an extra step to set up.) Both filters require that you arrange data in list form: different records in different rows, different variables in different columns, and variable names in the first row of each column.

NOTE

If you don't put variable names in the list's first row, Excel's filters ask you whether you want to treat the first row ...