Chapter 7

Sorting and Filtering Your Data: Excel's Database Features

You hear the term database all the time, even in everyday conversation, but the concept is rarely defined. People tend to rely on a common sense understanding of databases, and that's usually good enough—and the reality is that even Excel has found the task of deciding what it really means by databasea bit troublesome. That doesn't have to concern us, but on the other hand, since we need to use the term throughout this chapter, we'll plunge ahead and define a database as a collection of records (i.e., rows) organized into fields, all of which are topped by titles.

And as it turns out, that's pretty close to the common sense understanding. Thus, the very standard collection of data shown in Figure 7–1 would qualify as a database.