There are many many applications that we can use today to carry out office work. We find some of the importance of Word or PowerPoint, but we cannot ignore Excel , one of the most used in the world. Next we will see how to sort and filter data in Excel in a totally personalized way.
As most of you already know more than enough, this is a program that belongs to the popular Microsoft Office suite. This suite of applications is popular across the globe and the software giant is fully aware of all of this. This is the main reason why those of Redmond do not stop working and improve their proposal in this regard based on new updates.
These, as expected, bring a multitude of new functions and improvements that help the user experience to a great extent. Well, within the suite as such, we do not find the aforementioned Excel, which is the program in which we will focus on these same lines.
At this point, the first thing to know is that the aforementioned Excel is the application used to design and work with spreadsheets. This is a software solution that has been with us for many years.
Why do I need to have Excel on my computer
To give us an idea of what we are talking about, say that it is a powerful program that is used in all kinds of environments, both professional and more domestic.
On the assumption that it is the first time that we face it, the truth is that in principle it may seem like a program for corporate uses, totally professional. But this is not the case, since Microsoft is responsible for offering us useful functions and features for all types of users, even at home. This allows us to keep household accounts, manage our personal finances , etc.
In the current market, we have the possibility to make use of many other similar proposals. We will even find them free, as with the LibreOffice alternative. But with everything and with it, most try to imitate the behavior of Excel both at a functional and interface level. Of course, something that we must bear in mind is that when it comes to getting the most out of this program, it is not an easy task.
To the joy of many and the despair of others, this is a software that in itself has a huge number of functions that it puts at our disposal. To all this we can add the fact that it has all kinds of formulas and different types of programming that we can take advantage of, some more complex to use than others. With all this, what is really achieved is that Excel adapts to both end users and large companies.
Work better with your data in Excel with Sort and Filter
Something that we must bear in mind when working with this Microsoft program is that when dealing with numbers, they can be counted by the thousands on the same sheet. That is why the order of all this could facilitate its use and interpretation in the future. And what to say when we get to the point where we need to do some kind of query here and come across thousands of cells packed with data and results of operations.
For all this, it is precisely for what the functions that we will talk about next will serve you. We refer more specifically to the possibility of sorting and filtering searches in Excel in certain selected data ranges , something for which we will help you below.
How to sort data ranges in Excel
Well, let’s start learning the easiest way to sort a certain range of data in the Office program. To do this, normally we will already have the sheet data entered, so we only have to select with the mouse the range of cells with which we want to work in this case.
Whether it is a lot of numerical data, or a few, the way this functionality works to sort in Excel is the same, we just have to worry about selecting them correctly. Next, once this is done, we go to the Data menu option and locate the Sort and filter section. Here we already see two buttons called Sort .
Specifically, both buttons refer to the two operating modes that we find here. The first one, located at the top of this section, will order the selection made before, from smallest to largest, without further complications. On the other hand, otherwise, we click on the button that is seen just below, which allows us to order from highest to lowest. Therefore, as we can see, ordering numerical data in Excel is extremely simple, in both ways, too.
Filter data in data queries in Excel
On the other hand we find the data filtering function that includes the same program. It is worth mentioning that this functionality that we are talking about will be very helpful when making certain queries on the sheets. This is something that is especially useful if we have a document with a huge amount of numerical data, even if it is correctly structured.
So what we do to benefit from it, as before, the first thing we do is mark the range of data that interests us with the mouse.
This will give way to a new configuration window that will help us greatly to customize the filters that we will apply here. To see it after clicking on the corresponding Filter button, click on the small arrow that appears in the first element of the marked cells.
At this point we must bear in mind that thanks to this function we are talking about, we will be able to filter the search both by color and by data. In the first of the cases, we only have to uncheck those contents of the selection that appear at the bottom of the new window. This will make them disappear from the sheet in order to have a view of what really interests us.
On the other hand, if we focus on the background color of the cells, place us in the drop-down list called Filter by color . Here the tones used in the selected range will appear, so that we can now choose those cells with that color that we want to show on the screen.
