Sorting & Filtering Excel 2007

Since the release of Microsoft Office 2007 back in February last year I have been on a one woman campaign to promote the benefits of the new and improved version to anyone who will listen. I wrote a Review of Office 2007 twelve months back, and if anything I have grown even more enamoured with each of the packages over the last eighteen months. As part of my campaign I will be writing a series of Articles show-casing some of the many new and improved features of Office 2007.

I start with one of my personal favourites - Sorting & Filtering in Excel 2007.

Excel has always had the capability to take large amounts of data and perform some form of sorting and filtering of the information. However, until now we have been limited to three levels of sort and the AutoFilter, whilst very good, has always stopped short of the mark. In the new version we can sort on as many columns as the computer can handle, sort on colour, filter for multiple criteria, filter for above average data as well as numerous other preset filters.

Excel 2007 Sorting

As I said above we have always been able to sort on upto three levels using Data + Sort. If we had a worksheet with all of our customer data we could sort them by Country, then by County and then by City but then if we wanted to sort them by names we ran out of available levels.

Excel 2007 can now sort on as many levels as your computer can handle which in a nutshell means as many as you can think of! There is also the capability to reorder your sort levels as the need arises. There are some great new options to sort on both Font and Fill colour which come in very handy for those of us that like colourful spreadsheets.

Excel 2007 Filtering

AutoFilter in Excel has been around for many years and we have been able to filter on text and number fields. However, we have been limited to only two text fields and date filtering has always been a problem:

In the new 2007 version they have completed redone the Filtering. For text fields we can now simply tick a box next to as many entries as we wish.

With numeric fields they have introduced predesigned filters including Top 10 and Above average. 

The Date filters have been the most changed, with the ability to chose specific years, months and days along with predesigned filters including Today, This Month, Year to Date.

There are many more new and improved features with both Excel and all the other packages. I'll be writing about them in future monthly articles.

Even if you have not upgraded to Office 2007 you can still download a 60 day trial that you can run alongside your current version. I cannot stress enough the benefits of the new version. I love it and I'm sure you will too!!