Excel 2003 specialized autofilter

softnetlog, on Monday March 10, 2008 11:57:09 AM

Hello,
I'm working on a large worksheet on Excel 2003, with over 1000 rows. Each row consists of one movie, and each column provides information for each movie, eg. origin, director, genre etc. Now, I've added the Autofilter fields above each of the columns so I can easily find what I'm looking for, but the problem is with genre. Some movies vary between 2-4 different genres, which means I will either have to have four different columns (genre 1, genre 2, etc.) or somehow find a way for the Autofilter to recognize each row as its own, so that if I want to find a Comedy, the Autofilter would find each movie with the word Comedy in all of these genre columns, not just the one column above which the current Autofilter function is situated. So how do I do this? How can I get the autofilter to use multiple cells, or how can I input multiple data into one cell, so that all the genre options are in one place, not spread over four different cells and columns?

Configuration: Windows XP
Internet Explorer 6.0

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great_0, on Tuesday March 11, 2008 10:15:30 AM

I have three ideas, none of them ideal.
1: Duplicate the movie on another row, and change the genre. If movie "Romance Comedy #782" was a Romance Comedy, it would get two rows: one for Romance, one for Comedy.
Advantage: Easy to filter by genre.
Disadvantage: Duplicate movies if you're not filtering by genre.

2: Have one column for each recognized genre. Movie "Romance Comedy #782" would have TRUE in its "Romance" column, TRUE in its "Comedy" column, and FALSE in its "Action" column.
Advantage: Easy to filter.
Advantage: Can filter by more than one genre. (Find all movies with "Romance" and "Comedy," but not "Romance" or "Comedy".)
Disadvantage: Added hassle if you add a genre.
Disadvantage: Spreads the data out..

3: Put the genres in one column and one row. Then, on the AutoFilter, choose (Custom). In the dialog, surround what you're looking for in *'s. To find all comedies, you would filter by *Comedy*. You would end up with "Romance Comedy #782," but not "Generic Explosions 4: The Subwoofer Workout."
Advantage: Data's compact.
Disadvantage: Filtering more of a pain.

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mukesh, on Thursday May 15, 2008 10:40:25 AM

I want to extract a single word from a coloumn of 10 rows. In each cell I have a sentence of 2 or 3 words. So first I have to separate each word and then compare each word to another column of text. Which has only one word, if exact match is found then, it should display that exact match

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