Performing Calculations While Filtering

Filtering a list means displaying only a part of it. You provide the criteria you want used, and then Excel displays only those list records that match the criteria. Filtering is especially useful if you have a large list and you want to work with only a subset of the records in the list. Other ExcelTips have described different ways you can create and apply filters to your worksheets.

When you are using the advanced filtering capabilities of Excel you can perform calculations during the filtering process. For instance, let's assume you have a large inventory list in a worksheet, and you want to filter the list to show only those records that were in a particular department and that have a higher-than-average profit. This is easy to do by entering the following formulas at the indicated cells:

This example provides for a text comparison related to the department number (in cell A2) and a comparison of the profit for the item (I7, which is a relative cell reference and therefore changes for each comparison) to the average profit for the entire inventory ($I$7:$I$42, which is an absolute reference and therefore does not change for each comparison). If an absolute reference had not been used for the AVERAGE function, the wrong results would have been generated by the filtering.

The result of the filtering, using the above criteria, is that only those records that had a profit greater than the average (the average in I7:I42) were displayed.