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214 Part IV: Managing and Securing Data
AND and OR conditions. When you click the (Custom) item on a field’s pop-up menu,
Excel opens the Custom AutoFilter dialog box, where you select the type of operator
to use in evaluating the first and the second condition in the top and bottom drop-
down list boxes and the values to be evaluated in the first and second condition in
the associated combo boxes. You also specify the type of relationship between the
two conditions with the AND or OR radio buttons (the AND radio button is selected
by default).

When selecting the operator for the first and second condition in the leftmost drop-
down list boxes at the top and bottom of the Custom AutoFilter dialog box, you have
the following choices:

Equals
Does not equal
Is greater than
Is greater than or equal to
Is less than
Is less than or equal to
Begins with
Does not begin with

End with
Does not end with
Contains
Does not contain
Note that you can use the Begins with, Ends with, and Contains operators and their
negative counterparts when filtering a text field — you can also use the question
mark (?) and asterisk (*) wildcard characters when entering the values for use with
these operators. (The question mark wildcard stands for individual characters and
the asterisk for one or more characters.) You use the other logical operators when
dealing with numeric and date fields.

When specifying the values to evaluate in the associated combo boxes on the right
side of the Custom AutoFilter dialog box, you can type in the text, number, or date, or
you can select an existing field entry by clicking the box’s drop-down list button and
then clicking the entry on the pop-up menu.

Try It

Exercise 16-7: Filtering the Records in a Data List
Open the Exercise16-7.xls file in your Chapter 16 folder in the My Practice
Spreadsheets folder on your hard disk or in the Excel Workbook folder on the work-
book CD-ROM. This workbook contains a copy of the Employee Data List that you can
use to practice querying a data list by filtering out all records except for those that
contain the data with which you want to work:

1. Choose the Excel Data➪Filter➪AutoFilter command.
Excel responds by adding drop-down list boxes to each of the field names in row
1 of the Employee Data List.