"find" and "filter" working weirdly

[weiin t via OfficeKB.com]

hi
i hv an excel sheet with more than 60,000 rows of data (abt 8 columns)
i need to find one particular number in all that data. i use ctrl-f to
search for that number. excel says data can't be found. i do a filter on
that column with the numbers and do not see that number in the scroll down
list.

BUT, that number IS in the sheet. after i found it (manually), the ctrl-f
works... excel magically finds what it could not find earlier. yet, the
filter scroll down list still does not display that number.

question: what is happening? is it because there is just too much data that
excel does not look in each and every cell?

hope someone can help. i just cannot keep manually searching through
thousands of rows... thanks in advance!

 

[Debra Dalgleish]

An AutoFilter dropdown list will only show 1000 entries. If your column
has more than 1000 unique items, they can be filtered, but they can't
all be displayed in the dropdown list. The items in the column appear
alphabetically sorted in the dropdown list, and only the first 1000
alphabetical entries will appear.

To AutoFilter for an item that doesn't appear in the dropdown list, you
can choose Custom from the dropdown list, and type the criteria, as
you're currently doing. Also, there are a couple of workarounds here:

http://www.contextures.com/xlautofilter02.html