Advanced Filter

[u2bredbkwhen]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

I am a new Mac user and am having difficulty adjusting to Office for Mac. Incidentally, I am using the Student version.

I regularly download a list of job opportunities with the following fields as column headings: a brief job description (text), wage (contents may be text or number), job type (text), location (text)) and date posted (text formatted with a 2-digit year).

I have tried to filter the "Location" using a formula ="<>West*" and also using a simple a text entry (West*). These techniques worked nicely in Excel for Windows.

The examples above result in the entire list being filtered out (all rows of the list are hidden).

Searching Excel help for Advanced Filter returned only help for Autofilter and I was unable to locate a similar post on your forum.

Can someone show me where I am going wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help.
u2b

 

[CyberTaz]

Welcome: You really shouldn't see much difference although the feature sets
aren't identical. Those that are shared work pretty much the same way if you
compare the Mac version to 2003 or prior... 2007 is a totally different
story

As for your current issue, it works fine here -- assuming that you aren't
actually including the = & "" in your criteria. The Location criteria should
read: <>West* or West* based on your examples.

I'd first suspect an error in the specified Criteria Range or that at least
one of the cells in the criteria range contains an inadvertent <space> or
some such "invisible" character.

BTW: the fact that you're using the Home & Student Edition isn't at all
relevant as the apps are the same in all editions. What *is* important is
what your specific update level is for both Office 2008 & OS X.

 

[u2bredbkwhen]

Bob,

Thanks for the quick response.

Sorry for not including the udpates for each - didn't even occur to me.

Office updated to 12.1.7
OS updated to 10.5.7 Build 9J61

You're right. There are leading spaces both before and after most of the fieldnames and much of the data. I'm embarrassed that that I didn't catch this myself.

I just tested using the wildcard both before and after the criteria and the filter worked as expected.

Thanks for your patience.
u2b

 

[CyberTaz]

No problem ‹ glad you were able to resolve it... Ya just can't trust data
that comes from *any* outside sources

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac