Autofiltering on Two Columns (Excel)

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Hi All .. .

I am using autofiltering. I would like to get all the rows that contain a certain word in either column E OR in column J. If I do a custom filter in Column E, I have limited my rows for the filter on Column J.

Is there a way to get all the rows that meet this conditon:

Custom Search on Column E OR Custom Search on Column J

Thanks,

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Cat

Sebastian says Hi, can you come out and play?

OK how about:
1) Make a column with a Formula say something like:
=IF(OR(E1=”Certain Word”,J1=”Certain Word”),1,0)
This will give you 1s where you find your word in either column, or both, and 0 if you don’t, then…
2) Filter on that column.

Will that work for you?

Wassim

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Hi Wassim,

ummm, say “Hi” to Sebastian for me. Whose Sebastian?

Yes, this will work great. I had tried to concatenate the two columns into another column, but one of the columns was pretty wordy — so, this was changing the rowheights causing the spreadsheet to not look too pretty. I like your method better.
Thanks.

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Thanks Rory and Wassim,

I ended up using this formula in a new column:

=IF(ISERROR(FIND($B$1,E1)+FIND($B$1,J4)),0,1)

The user then enters the word or phase in Cell B1, clicks on a macro button which filters on this hidden column for the 1s.

Again, thanks.

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catoothaker

Sebastian is my cute long-hair Persian cat who’s 6 months birthday is today…

Wassim

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Hi Cat,
I think you’ve got two basic choices here:
1. Add an extra column that concatenates E and J and apply your custom autofilter (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?) to that column.
2. Use advanced filtering rather than autofiltering.
Hope that helps.

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