Page 622 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

604 Filtering Data
The easiest way to perform this basic type of filtering on a field is to first deselect the check box in front of the (Select All) option at the top of the field’s list box to clear the check boxes, and then select each of the check boxes containing the entries for the records you do want displayed in the filtered data list. After you finish selecting the check boxes for all the entries you want to keep, you click OK to close the AutoFilter drop-down menu.
Excel then hides rows in the data list for all records except for those that contain the entries you just selected. The program also lets you know which field or fields have been used in the filtering operation by adding a cone filter icon to the column’s AutoFilter button. To restore all the records to the data list, you can remove the filtering by clicking the Clear command button in the Sort & Filter group of the Data tab of the Ribbon or by pressing Alt+AC.
When doing this basic kind of list filtering, you can select specific entries from more than one field in this list. Figure 2-1 illustrates this kind of situation. Here, I want only the employees in the company who work in the Engineering and Information Services departments in the Chicago and Seattle offices. To do this, I selected only the Engineering and Information Services entries in the list box on the Dept field’s AutoFilter drop-down menu and only the Chicago and Seattle entries in the list box on the Location field’s AutoFilter drop-down menu.
As you can see in Figure 2-1, after filtering the Employee data list so that only the records for employees in either the Engineering or Information Services department in either the Chicago or Seattle office locations are listed, Excel adds the cone filter icon to the AutoFilter buttons on both the Dept and Location fields in the top row, indicating that the list is filtered using criteria involving both fields.
Figure 2-1:
The employee data list after filtering the Dept and Location fields.