MacMost Now 680: Filtering Rows and Columns in Numbers

You can hide rows and columns in Numbers to effectively filter your data. Hiding can be done one row or column at a time, or by groups of rows and columns. You can also set criteria for rows or columns to be automatically filtered, allowing you to see only the data you need.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let me show you how to filter rows and columns in Numbers. So in Excel one of the things you can do is you can filter your rows and columns so it doesn't show them all at once. And you can do the same thing in Numbers but you won't find it if you search for filters; it's simply just hiding rows and columns. Let me show you. So here I have some sample data in a simple table here in Numbers. If I select any row here I can go over and see there's a button here I can click on and I can do things like adding a row, deleting this row. I can also hide the row. So I'm gonna do that I'm gonna hide row number nine, you're gonna see it disappear. And there you go, see it goes from eight to ten. Now notice at the bottom here I have a total and that didn't change. It was one hundred and twenty four before I hid the row so the numbers are still being calculated; I've just simply hid that one. I can select multiple ones, say I wanna hide like a whole section here, and hide selected rows. Notice also that I can select any row here and unhide all rows or just unhide the rows that are adjacent to the one I have selected. Now though it doesn't make sense for this table right here I could also click here on the column heading and I can hide the selected columns. So if I had some extra columns here, let's see I can select that one, you can see I can do it now; it doesn't make much sense. But it does make a lot of sense in a lot of spreadsheets where you have all sorts of columns of data and you wanna focus on just one or two, you don't wanna delete them. So you just hide everything they you're not using at the moment. So here's a different spreadsheet and this is population data for each state. So say I wanted to just look at the states that had over a certain population. I can easily do that by selecting the table, bringing up the reorganize panel there, and then let's say lets choose the population column. See, it uses the proper name since I have a header row there. So population is 'greater than' and let's then give a number like five million. And then you can see it will then filter it out and just show me those states there where the populations that. I can of course set it to 'is greater than', 'is less than', 'in between', all sorts of different things. All the rest of the states are there but I've just filtered out to see the ones that I want. And you probably noticed there the plus button, which means that I can add more criteria. So if I've got things I want to match in multiple columns I can add that and only show the rows that match all the different criteria for all the different columns that I want and really narrow down what want to be able to see in that table. So I hope you found this useful. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Want more video tutorials? Just go to MacMost.com, click on the videos link at the top of the page, and then you can view all the hundreds of MacMost videos by category.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 680: Filtering Rows and Columns in Numbers”

Gill

13 years ago

Hi Gary
Finding your videos the best! A great find.
Is there any way of getting the total to reflect only the total of the filtered info?
Either when hiding rows or using categories.
I want to filter out figures for a particular tax year (which I can do) but can't figure out how to get a total for only that info. ie. the grand total still shows as illustrated in your tutorial. Is this the only option?
Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

I don't think filtering is what you want. You want to perform a calculation. So a formula is what you want. Start by checking out the SUMIFS function.

Becca

12 years ago

Perfect, just what I needed to know. Thank you!

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MacMost Now 680: Filtering Rows and Columns in Numbers

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 680: Filtering Rows and Columns in Numbers”

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