What is a filter? - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- [Instructor] So I'm willing to bet you've heard the term filter a lot, but just what is a filter in Excel? A filter is a quick way to display only the data you care about at a particular moment. For example, in this data at this very moment, I only care about Jan Kotas' sales. So I just need to click anywhere in the data and then to apply a filter for Jan, I'm going to go to the Data tab and then click Filter. And then you see these filter buttons appear at the tops of columns. I'm going to filter the Sales Rep column, and I'm going to deselect Select All, and then check Only Jan. I'll click OK. And what comes back are just the rows for Jan Kotas. Right there is a filter that's been applied. Let's take a look at some important signals here in Excel that appear when we filter things. First of all, the Filter button, if you used it, it will contain a little filter icon. And then over on the left, you'll see these rows are a partial or subset of all the rows. So again, just another cue that you're only seeing a subset and not the whole dataset. And down in the lower left, you'll see in the status bar, it says 56 of 390 records found. This just means that 56 of the 390 rows were returned for Jan Kotas. Now let's apply another filter for Jan's sales, but this time we want to filter for her sales only if they pertain to Company H. So we'll go ahead and deselect Select All and check Company H. Click OK, and there we have two filters applied, one for sales rep Jan Kotas and one for customer name Company H. So now that we got what we wanted out of this little investigation into Jan's sales, we're now going to clear the filters to see all the data again. So we'll go ahead and click the Filter button and select Clear, and then we'll click the Filter button and select Clear. And there we're back to where we started with all the data back. So that's what a filter is and how to apply one. Again, filters are a way to temporarily see only the data you care about for a particular moment, because in another moment, you might care about someone else's sales or a certain month's sales and so forth and so on.