Sort and Filter in Excel

The most common task people do in Excel is to search for useful data. For example, you may want to know the cheapest hospital for chest pain treatment. Or you may want to know the most expensive healthcare treatments in a particular region of the country. 

The sort and filter operations are meant to do these type of analyses. Sorting means to arrange the data (typically a column) in increasing, decreasing or alphabetical order. Filters, as the name suggests, enable you to filter out certain data, like all the hospitals in Alabama or all the hospitals treating chest pain. 

Sort and filter are probably the most commonly used operations. In fact, filtering is so common that we recommend you to memorise it's shortcut - Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + L.

Next, you'll see some of the common problems that occur while using sort and learn to avoid them.

Remember that sorting only works when the data is in the correct format. Next, you'll learn how to sort data on multiple levels simultaneously. For example, you may want to sort all states in a country alphabetically and within each state sort all hospitals from highest to lowest cost or within each state sort hospitals alphabetically. This cannot be done by simply applying the sort twice because the second sort operation overrides the first one. 

You'll need to use custom sort to apply a sort operation within an already sorted range. You can also think of this as a Multi-Level Sort.

In this segment, you learnt the sort and filter operations. The key takeaways from the session are:

• Searching can be done using Ctrl + F or by filtering data  
• Sorting can be done on numbers (increasing / decreasing ) and characters (A-Z / Z-A)   
• Sorting works only when the data is in the correct format
• Custom Sort can be used to apply multi - level sort