Most people are used to doing things in a certain, predefined way in Excel. One of those things is filtering the data.
But for this, as for other options in Excel, there are limitless possibilities. In the example below, we will show you how to filter your data by rows rather than by columns.
Filter Rows Instead of Columns
Let us presume that we have the following list of salespeople and their achieved sales in different years:
Now, the usual way in which we would sort these figures is by columns, i.e. we would go on and see who made the best figures every single year.
But what are we want to see in which year a particular person made the best sales?
To do this, we need to select the range B2:F10, excluding column A totally:
After we do this, we go to the Data tab >> Sort & Filter >> Sort:
When we click on it, we will see the following window:
Our next step is to go and click on Options:
Clicking on this button will just open up a little window for us, in which we need to choose Sort left to right option:
Then, we choose the row to sort by (row number 4, for our example) and order as Largest to Smallest (to see the largest numbers in row number 4 first):
You can only see Custom List field in the picture below. This field is an option for any saved ordering list that you could potentially use. We will be satisfied with the suggested options as of now, select Largest to Smallest and click OK:
When we click OK, you will notice that the data in the 4th row (sales data for Jack) are ordered from largest to smallest, which is exactly what we wanted. If we would like to order any other row by this or any other criteria, we would have to repeat all the steps said above.