Chapter 4: Data Sorting & Filtering in Excel – Practical Guide for Beginners

📘 Chapter 4: Data Handling & Sorting

Data handling is at the core of working efficiently in Excel. Whether you’re organizing sales records or maintaining student grades, sorting and filtering make large datasets easier to manage. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to sort, filter, remove duplicates, and clean up messy data using Excel’s powerful tools.

🔢 Sorting Data in Excel

Sorting allows you to organize data alphabetically, numerically, or by date. You can sort by one or multiple columns.

• Ascending Order (A–Z or 0–9): Sorts values from lowest to highest
• Descending Order (Z–A or 9–0): Sorts values from highest to lowest

Steps:

1. Select the data range (e.g., A1:D100)
2. Go to Data > Sort
3. Choose column and order (A-Z or Z-A)
4. Click OK

🔍 Filtering Data

Filters help you display only the rows that meet specific criteria. It’s perfect for narrowing down results.

Steps:

1. Select your dataset including headers
2. Go to Data > Filter
3. Click the drop-down arrow on a column
4. Choose criteria (e.g., “Only show January”)

🎯 Advanced Filter Techniques

• Filter by Text: Contains, Begins With, Ends With
• Filter by Number: Greater Than, Less Than, Between
• Filter by Date: This Week, Last Month, Next Year
• Color Filter: Filter based on cell color or font color

♻️ Removing Duplicates

Excel allows you to remove duplicate entries to clean up your data.

Steps:

1. Select the column or entire table
2. Go to Data > Remove Duplicates
3. Select the column(s) to check for duplicates
4. Click OK – duplicates are removed!

🧼 Cleaning Data

• TRIM(): Removes extra spaces → =TRIM(A1)
• CLEAN(): Removes non-printable characters → =CLEAN(A1)
• UPPER()/LOWER()/PROPER(): Changes text case
• FIND()/SEARCH(): Locate specific characters/words

📄 Use Case Example

Scenario: You have 100 customer entries with repeated names and mixed-case city names.

• Use Remove Duplicates to clean customer list
• Apply PROPER() to standardize city names
• Sort by Total Purchase (Z-A)
• Filter by State = “Karnataka”

📝 Practice Task

1. Create a sample employee table with Name, Department, Salary, and City
2. Sort the table by Salary (High to Low)
3. Filter the table to show only employees from “Marketing”
4. Use PROPER() to format all names correctly
5. Remove duplicates in the “City” column

✅ Conclusion

Data handling in Excel helps turn messy sheets into clean, readable, and actionable formats. Sorting and filtering allow for dynamic views, while functions like TRIM and REMOVE DUPLICATES streamline your workflow. In the next chapter, we’ll explore **Conditional Formatting** to visually highlight important data!