Creating a wildcard filter

- [Narrator] A lot of business data follows patterns, both in the sense that the data reflects daily, monthly, or quarterly trends, or that it contains similar values for related items. In this movie, I will show you how to build on those patterns in your data by creating wildcard filters. My sample file is the workbook named Wildcard Filter, and you can find it in the Chapter Six folder of your exercise files collection. I have a highlight table here, which indicates the relative magnitude of the values in my values field.

Let's say that I want to filter those values so that I only see certain ones. The first thing I need to is to create a filter. I want to filter by Property City, which is the list of cities I have here. So, I will go to the Data tab, and I will click Property City's down arrow, and click Show Filter. Doing so adds that field to the filters area. Now I can double-click it to open the Filter dialogue box, and I'll drag over to the side.

If I want to use a wildcard that is a pattern, then I can click the Wildcard tab. And here I have a number of options. First is that I can look for values that contain a certain string that Start with, End with, or Exactly match. I'll start with Start with, so I will select that option. And let's say that I only want to see cities that begin with the letter P. So I'll click in the Match value box and type the letter P, and click Apply, and you can see that I have Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Portland.

Also note that in this case the match is not case sensitive, so even though I typed a lowercase P, I'm still getting all the values that start with capital P's. If I want to get rid of the filter, I can click Clear, and Apply, and there it is. If I wanted to do Ends with, then I could select Ends with, and if I want to match values that end with the letter S, I'll click that, or type the S in the Match value box, click Apply, and I see Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New Orleans.

And I'll click Clear and Apply to get rid of that. Exactly match is basically a search for an individual value, so if I click Exactly matches, and then type Boston, and Apply, I see only Boston. But if I were to type B-O-S, and click Apply, then I wouldn't see anything because nothing matches it. And I'll go ahead and click Clear and Apply again. Now say that I want to use Contains. Contains looks for a string or a single value anywhere within the field that we're filtering.

So, for example, if I were to click the Contains option, and then go into Match value, and type in A, and Apply, then I would only see cities that have an A in the name. If I want to exclude cities that have an A in its name, then I could check the Exclude box, and I also see Does not contain, Does not start with, and so on, and click Apply, and I see Boston, Denver, New York, Phoenix, and Richmond, which are the only cities that don't have an A anywhere in their name.

I can click Clear and Apply to get rid of the filter, and clear the Exclude check box so that it's no longer being applied. When you're done applying your filter, you can either Reset to go back to the original, click Cancel to stop any filtering that you don't want to apply, or click OK to close the dialogue box, and leave the existing filter in place. Any time that you need to filter your database on a pattern, be sure to go to the Wildcard tab, and you'll be able to narrow down to the values you want.