Solved: Autofilter's Strengths And Weaknesses..

[Wolfgang]

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]

I found a list of limitations here:

http://www.mschaef.com/cgi-bin/blosx...r_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.