Filtering Data with a Drop Down field

[Guest]

I have a table that kind of looks like this:

Auto Dinner IE Welcome Ball
Corp Annual Rpt
Name Company Title
P.M. Ford President X
X
J.M. Microsoft CEO X X
X
K.M. Microsoft CFO X
X

The first three letter of the "event" signal the industry we are targeting,
so Auto will be for Automotive, Corp for Corporate, IE for Industrial
Equipment, etc. I need to set up a drop down field that will filter by
Industry, for example if I only want to only see the "events" for Automotive
my table will reduce to this:

Auto Dinner Corp Annual
Rpt
Name Company Title
P.M. Ford President X X
J.M. Microsoft CEO X X

K.M. Microsoft CFO X


The ones marked Corp should always display but the one starting with IE will
dissapear. Something similar will happen if I select IE then Auto Dinner
will hide, etc.

Is there a way to do this?

 

[Steve Smallman]

Patricia,

On the data menu is an entry called Filter, under that is an entry called
auto filter.

This turns on the drop down filter arrows to filter a list in place and on
the fly.

I think this is what you are after.

Steve

 

[Guest]

Yes, I know abou that. The problem is that it filters rows and not columns.
Is there a way to hide columns?

 

[Steve Smallman]

Patricia

sorry, to the best of my knowledge the filtering is based on criteria
columns and data rows, so in short, no column hiding.

unless you use VBA,

say a combo box to select, a change event for the combobox to hide the
columns not required

another option you might wish to explore is using a pivot table to summarise
the data, it gets awfully messy , but may achieve your goal. you could add
the columns containing event type to the page area, company, position and
name to the row area and add name to the data area, using the count
function.


Steve