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Wolfgang
06-20-2006, 03:11 AM
Hi Knowledgeables?

Is there a concise non-sales-rep description regarding Excel?s Autofilter features including its strengths and weaknesses?

The people which I am supposed to deliver a short speech to are familiar with tables and statistics (bankers)?

I know who wants to explain anything to that group of people for they normally tell you what to do, ah well?

Thank you very much

Best,
Wolfgang

Jacob Hilderbrand
06-20-2006, 10:41 PM
I found a list of limitations here:

http://www.mschaef.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2005/07/18#list_filter_0_motivation

However, AutoFilter is not without its problems:

AutoFilter imposes its own user interface: if you want a look-and-feel other than stock, you're out of luck.
For wide data tables with lots of columns, it can be hard to see the current AutoFilter query. To see the entire query requires horizontal scrolling down the header row.
Cell formatting and AutoFilter are independant of each other. If you want position dependant formatting (alternate row formatting, for example), it has to be recreated after each AutoFilter adjustment.
An AutoFilter works by selectively 'hiding' rows in the worksheet it's a part of. This means that an AutoFiltered list can't share rows with anything else that you don't also want selectively 'filtered' from view.
You can't have more than one AutoFilter on a worksheet tab.
AutoFilter isn't part of the natural 'ebb and flow' of the life of a spreadsheet: it doesn't participate in the dependancy driven formula solver that drives Excel's computational capability. This has some profound (bad) implications:
As data rows are added and removed from the list being AutoFiltered, the AutoFilter has to be removed and reapplied to the new data list to reflect changes to its source.
You can't use AutoFilter to filter a list and then search that list with =LOOKUP() or =MATCH(): the lookup operation will search the entire list, not the filtered list.
If you AutoFilter a list that contains calculated cells, and those cells change value, the set of filtered rows is not updated.