Limiting Data That Appears on Your Screen

Excel 2007 spreadsheets can hold as much data as you need them to, but you might not want to work with all the data in a worksheet at the same time. For example, you might want to see the sales figures for your company during the first third, second third, and final third of a month. You can limit the data shown on a worksheet by creating a filter, which is a rule that selects rows to be shown in a worksheet.

To create a filter, you click the cell in the group you want to filter and then, on the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Sort & Filter and then click Filter. When you do, Excel 2007 displays a filter arrow at the right edge of the top cell in each column of the selected range. The arrow indicates that the Excel 2007 AutoFilter capability is active.