Pexels The illustration below is a screenshot of a spreadsheet with information about the Titanic ticket purchases. The spreadsheet lists fourteen attributes about passengers and will be used to show several filtering and sorting examples. To practice with this data set and follow along you can download the workbook here.
Titanic Data Set
Enabling Sort & Filter for a Data Set
The first step to sorting and filtering data is enabling the capabilities of a dataset. Each of the steps needed to enable sort and filter in Excel is shown below: Step 1. Select the row of the headers. Step 2. While on the “Home” tab, click the sort and filter button in the editing section of the ribbon. Step 3. Click on the filter option.
Enabling Sort & Filter
Each column header will have an arrow in the cell that can be clicked to display a menu of sort and filter tools. These added arrows are highlighted in the illustration below.
Sorting A to Z in Excel
Sorting from A to Z (or sorting from Z to A) can be accomplished in two steps. The Step 1. Select the down arrow on the column. Step 2. Select one of the first two sorting options.
Excluding Data in Excel
Data can be excluded by clicking on the down arrow located on the header and making changes to the checkboxes in the menu. Unchecking a box will exclude it from the data set. Perhaps you have outliers in the data that you would like to exclude temporarily. If you require only a few pieces of data, the select all check box can be unchecked giving you the opportunity to select what data is displayed by only checking the corresponding boxes.
Date Exclusion Option in Excel
Using the Custom Auto Filter in Excel
Text filters can come in handy especially if you have data with a lot of attributes to analyze. With this tool you can filter by equals, does not equal, greater than, less than, begins with ends with, and contains. For a text filter example, let’s look that the equals filter. The equals filter will display the exact data that is specified. In the illustration below I walk through each step to use this tool to filter by 2. Note that you are not limited to just one filter. An additional filter like one that will show all numbers greater than 4 can be added as well. This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional. © 2022 Joshua Crowder
