Introduction to using Autofilter in Excel

Autofilter is one of the most powerful features of Excel. It lets you treat a range of cells as a table and then filter out certain rows based on different criteria.

To use Autofilter, first ensure you have a table of data to work with. For a table to work properly with Autofilter it needs to meet the following criteria:

• Each column in the table should have a heading
• Each cell in a column should contain the same type of data. In other words, try to avoid having numbers in some cells in a column and text in others. This isn't an absolute requirement, but Autofilter will work a lot better if you do it this way.
• The range of cells should be contiguous. In other words, there should be no empty columns or rows in the data range. To test this, select a cell in the data range, then press CTRL+* (or CTRL+SHIFT+8 if you don't have a separate number keypa on your keyboard). If some of the cells in your data range aren't selected, you need to find the empty row or column that is causing the problem.

Once you have got a data range that meets these criteria, then do the following steps:

1. Select a cell in the range
2. Click Sort and Autofilter, then Filter.
3. The first row in the table (the header row) should change, with a small drop-down arrow on each cell in the header row.

You can now filter the table based on the values in the table. For example:

• If you have a table containing sales records, you might filter the Customer column to show only rows that relate to a specific customer.
• You may filter the Date column so only rows containing sales made between two dates are displayed.
• You might filter the Order Value column to hide all sales orders below $1000.

You could even combine all three so you only show sales made to a given customer within a given date range, and above $1000.