Let’s look at an example. During the week, I received a roster for my soccer club
noting when my team, “AA/4”, was required to setup or pack up the soccer fields
on behalf of the club. The following screenshot shows a section of this roster
up to week 6, which runs for a total of 14 weeks.
This excel sheet contained the Roster for every team in the club, 71 lines of information
the majority of which I do not need to know and makes it difficult for me to
identify my teams requirements across the whole season. The filter tool is perfect
to quickly “filter” out the unwanted information (i.e. details relating to other
teams) so I can easily see when my team is required to “set up” of “pack up”
a ground.
However, before we begin using the filter tool we must first remove the blank rows
(8, 14, 20, 22, 28, 34 in the above screenshot) as the filter tool considers
an entire blank row as the end of the data set.
* Note, the filter tool can handle a blank cell within a dataset, which will be included
in the category “(Blanks)”, however not an entire blank row.
Now that we have no blank rows, we can now insert the filters by highlighting the
header row (cells A1 through E1) as shown below;
And then clicking on the filter tool 
which is contained in the “data” tab ribbon, or by clicking Ctrl +Shift + L. If
you have completed this step correctly an arrow will appear next to each cell
in the header row as show below;
These arrows indicate that a filter can now be applied to the data contained within
that column.
By clicking on the Arrow in Column “D1” (“Set up Team”) I receive a drop down list
showing all the teams listed under the “Set Up Team” column, including my team
the AA/4’s as shown below;
At the moment all teams are checked. By clicking on the (Select All) tick box all
teams are unchecked. Then I tick the “AA/4” box (as shown below) so that it is
the only ticked option and click “OK”. Excel will then filter the list to only
show the times my team is required to “set up” a field.
In this instance my team was only required to setup once, on the 20th of June 2010;
As you can see, all the other unwanted rows are hidden and only the information relating
to the AA/4 conducting a “Set-up” remains. The 
symbol shows that a filter is being applied to column D, “Set Up Team”. To un-filter
the data set, simply click on the arrow next to column D and tick the “(Select
All)” box and press ok.
Once this is done I repeat the process for Column E, “Pack Up Team” to show when
my team is required to pack up the grounds;
In this case, my team is required to pack up the grounds on 4 separate locations
for a total of 7 occasions. .
In my next article I will explain how to use a nested IF Statement in conjunction
with the filter tool to show how I filter the “Roster” information I was given
to show the times when my team was required to “Set-up” or “Pack-up”, rather
than requiring two separate tables, which I then save as a CSV file and import
into my Google calendar.