Excel filtering with drop down menus

[penfold]

I have agreed to help in creating a new inventory of multiple things across our site. This is primarily to be used by other members of staff and they have always used a spreadsheet to do this so I am trying to keep with what they know. However, I can see that the amount of information that is going to be recorded is going to produce lots of information and I am hoping that I can make this easier to read using filters.

 

What I am trying to do is create a pull down menu which will privde a list of areas that the inventory covers which will then filter the rest of the infomation shown. I could have sworn I have used something similar before but when I have tried it myself using the filters it the dropdown option takes me to the filter options. Basically what I want is something similar to:

 

Area Location(dropdown list allowing users to select Area A, Area B...)

Area A (Data which matches the Area Location selection)

Area A

 

Is this possible, have I made all this up or am I just making more work for myself?

[Steve21]

You mean old style 1 step filters? Where you have the dropdown arrow, pick an item and it'll filter to those?

 

It's same with newstyle filter, just 1000000 more steps to it. Not sure if you can do the original style in 07+

 

Steve

[Steve21]

Just double checked if what I said is what you mean only two ways to do it really is a) macro/vba style, b) right click the cell you want aka Area A, an click filter by Name.

 

Know it's a pain but only way I know to do them.

 

Steve

[penfold]

Yeah, I have lots of information and wanted to be able to limit it to just show the areas based on a single value in the pull down menu selected by the user. It seems to me it was simpler to just have 1 option from a pull down rather than having to go through the filters selection which also seems to provide the ability to sort A-Z or by colour as I dont need those sorting options. I just wanted a simple solution for filtering on one value selected by the user.

 

I'm using 2010 by the way.(dont know if it makes a difference)

 

It looks like I'm out of date with excel

 

@Steve21 - Thanks, I was just trying to make my life easier while I was updating specific areas so I would only see them. I thought it would be a good idea to have a simple pulldown filter for the people who will be using the spreadsheet after I've done my bit. Nevermind, I'll use the inbuilt filtering options, it's just a little overkill for what I needed.

Edited September 6, 2011 by penfold

[Steve21]

Aye totally agree, a lot of the 07+ (including 10 ) is just annoying routes. They try to make it easier, but make it a lot more annoying!

 

Steve