Filtering table data

- [Instructor] The filtering options on a table allow you to limit the number of records on screen to only those of interest. Just like with sorting, this allows you to quickly get to the information that you need. I'm gonna go ahead and open up the guest table once again and this time we're gonna take a look at the filtering options in the sort and filter group here on the home tab. For this example, I just wanna see the guests that live in China. The easiest way to do that is to find a record that matches what you want to filter by for instance I've got this customer right here, Anne Harvey, on line number 11, and she is from the country of China.

Then I can come up to the filter icons, the ones with the little funnel icon, and go to selection and I have the option of either saying, equals China, does not equal China, contains China, or does not contain China. I'm gonna choose equals China, and then I'll filter all of the guests to just those from the country of China. If I take a look at the bottom of the screen, I can see that we have a total of 19 guests that meet this criteria. Also at the bottom, we have another visual cue that the table is currently filtered with this button right here. We can actually click this button to toggle between an unfiltered state of our data, and the last filter that was applied.

We have a similar button up here on the ribbon that does the exact same thing with the toggle filter button. I can toggle the filter off and then toggle it back on again. We can continue to filter our data down even further. For instance, I can choose somebody with the last name of Dixon, for instance, Cynthia Dixon right here. Let's go ahead and go back to the selection button and say equals Dixon. Now I've filtered all of my guests down to just the two guests that have the last name of Dixon, and are from the country of China. Again, toggling between the unfiltered and filtered views, makes it easy to go back and forth.

If we want to filter our record based off of multiple criteria for the same field, we can use the menu attached to the header for each column. I'm gonna click on this menu here next to the country, and we can see all the different values that apply to this column. I'll go ahead and turn on United States, so now we'll see all the people named Dixon that are from China or the United States. When I do that, we can see that we have a total of three guests that meet those criteria. So for a quick exploration of the data, a filter could bring up just what you need in a hurry. While you can toggle between a filtered and an unfiltered state, there's no actual way to save multiple filters and move back and forth between those.

At first, this might seem like it would be a very useful feature and an obvious oversight, rest assured though that you'll see why this is when we get into exploring query objects. While you can filter your data here inside of the table directly, queries really do take that functionality to the next level.