Excel Video 34 covers filtering text in tables. Filtering text is more straight-forward with fewer options than filtering dates or numbers, so I’m including a couple of other tricks in this video as well. Watch the demonstration of using custom filters to see how to apply multiple filters to the same field or column of data. You can also use the custom filter feature to apply multiple filters to numbers and dates as well. You’ll also learn how to apply a filter to multiple columns at the same time. Finally, I’ll show you a shortcut in the data tab to remove all of the filters you’ve set at once.
I’m filtering a column with just 7 different doctors to make the example easy to understand, but the real power of text filters comes when you’ve got a ton of different data, like patient names. I’ve used text filters to help clinics find all patients with a given characteristic in their names, for example. Another time text filters may come in handy is if you have the same data with slight spelling differences in your table. For example, if you filter for St. Louis, you won’t get St Louis or Saint Louis. Filtering the text for Louis may be a clever way to solve that problem.
