Custom Autofilter

[anon]

I am trying to filter for all part numbers beginning with 96745. The full numbers would be 9674528, 9674534,
etc. Following the dialogs under autofilter and custom, I select "begins with" and enter 96745. But after
clicking ok the screen is blank, no records are found. What am I missing here?

 

[David Biddulph]

Have you got spaces (or other non-visible characters) before your numbers?
If in doubt, try a formula such as =LEFT(A1,5) to check what your numbers do
start with.

 

[RichardSchollar]

Autofilter won't work for me in this way if the part numbers are
genuine numerics - I presume this will be the case for you also.

Assuming this is the case, and that conversion to Text of these part
nos won't cause you an issue, then you can select the part nos column,
go Data>TextToColumns and when the dialog opens, click next, click
Next again and select the Column Data Format to be Text. Now you can
use "Begins With" in autofilter.

Hope this helps!

Richard

 

[Dave Peterson]

Or you could insert a helper column and convert the real numbers to text (that
looks like numbers).

Either
=a2&""
or
=text(a2,"000000000")
if you want to preserve leading 0's

Then filter by that helper column.