Filtering to find just what you're looking for
Last lesson we sorted our tracking sheet without scrambling it, which, if you happen to be the Casey of your household, felt like a genuine victory. Sorting is grand when you want to see everything in a new order. But sometimes you do not want everything. You only want the piece that matters right now.
That is what filtering is for. Sorting rearranges the whole table. Filtering hides the rows you do not need and shows you only the ones that match something particular. Same data underneath, you are simply choosing what to look at.
Why this actually matters
A tracking sheet is only useful if you can find what you are looking for in it quickly. If you have three months of entries and you need to know "how much did I spend at Costco in October," scrolling through the whole list with your eyes is how mistakes happen, and it is slow, and you will stop doing it. Filtering gets you there in about ten seconds.
This ties back to an opinion I keep returning to. Most people do not have a spreadsheet problem, they have a question problem. You need to know what you are actually asking before you go clicking buttons. "I want to see everything from the pharmacy this year." "I want to see anything over $100." "I want just Tuesdays." Know the question first. Then filter to it.
How to actually filter
In Google Sheets, click any cell in your data, then go to Data > Create a filter. You will see little triangle icons appear at the top of each column. In Excel it is much the same under the Data tab; look for the filter button, and the same triangle icons show up.
Click the triangle on the column you want to filter by. Say it is your Category column. A little box pops up with checkboxes for every unique value in that column, food, gas, whatever your five categories are. Uncheck everything except the one you want, press okay, and there it is, your sheet shows only those rows. Everything else is still there, only hidden.
To bring it all back, click the triangle again and hit "select all," or clear the filter entirely.
You can also filter by condition instead of a checklist, things like "greater than," "contains this text," "is not empty." That is the one I use for dates a good deal, filtering down to just this month, or just last week.
A caution that has saved me more than once
Turn autosave on before you start playing with filters, and truly before you do much of anything in a shared sheet. I learned this one the hard way, not with filtering exactly, but close enough that it applies.
Dawson, my youngest, spilled apple juice straight onto the keyboard mid-sentence while I was typing out a formula. I lost about twenty minutes of work because autosave was off and I had not saved in a while. That was the day I turned autosave on for good, and I have not stopped talking about it since. Filters do not usually destroy your data, they only hide rows, but if you are in there clicking around and rearranging things too, you want the safety net running in the background, so a juice spill, a toddler on your lap, or you closing the tab by accident does not cost you a thing.
A few things that trip people up
Filtering only searches the column you clicked. If you filter Category to "food" it will not also filter by date at the same time, unless you set a second filter on the date column too. You can stack filters, food AND this month, and it will show you rows matching both.
Also, filters can make you think data has gone missing when it is really just hidden. If your totals look strange after filtering, check whether a filter is still on somewhere before you panic. I have done exactly that, stared at a number thinking I had broken a formula, and it was only a leftover filter from twenty minutes earlier.
And do not confuse "filter" with "delete." You are not removing anything. It is more like putting on reading glasses that only let you see what you asked for.
Try it
Open your tracking sheet from the last couple of lessons. Turn on the filter. Pick one category and filter down to just that. Then try a date filter, just this week or just this month. See how quickly you get to the answer compared with scrolling and squinting.
That is the whole skill. It is not fancy. It only answers the question you actually have, which is the point of the whole sheet in the first place.
Before next time
Filter your sheet down to one category and jot down what you spent there. Next lesson we will use that same idea to start pulling quick totals without retyping a single number.
- C