Introduction to Filtering Records

Data filtering consists of applying one or more criteria to isolate one or more records. Of course, you must specify have the object that holds the list. This can be a table, a form, or a query.

A filter is a criterion or a set of criteria that must be applied to a set of records to create a list of records that abide by a common rule. Filters can be used to isolate records on a table, a query, a form, or a report. There are differences on the way each type of value handles it.

To filter records that display on a data sheet, first decide what column to use. Then: To get a list of records where the fields are empty, you can: Right-click the column and click Equals Blank Click any value under the column. In the Sort & Filter section of the Ribbon, click Selection and click Equals Blank

After clicking, the table or query would display only the records that are empty.

• To get a list of records where the fields are not empty, you can:
  • Right-click the column and click Does Not Equal Blank
  • Click any value under the column. In the Sort & Filter section of the Ribbon, click Selection and click Does Not Equal Blank

When a table, a query, or a form is filtered, in the Sort & Filter section of the Ribbon, the Toggle Filter button is highlighted . Also, the bottom section of the table, query, or form displays a Filtered button . If you perform another filter on the list, only the selected records would be considered. This means you must decide whether you want the new filtering to apply to all records or only to the new ones. If you want to use all records of the list, you must first remove the previous filter.

To dismiss the previous filtering operation:

• In the Sort & Filter section of the Ribbon, if the window is large enough to show the Toggle Filter button , then click it. If the width used by Microsoft Access is not large enough, then the Sort & Filter section would be equipped with the Remove Filter button . To remove the filtering, you can click that button
• Right-click the table, query, or form and click Clear Filter From ...
• Click the down-pointing button on the right side of the column name and click the Clear Filter From option. Here is an example:
   
  
• In the bottom section of the table, query, or form, click the Filtered button

In this and the next lessons, we will see different ways to examine the values stored in a database. Every time you finish visually analyzing data, you can dismiss the result or save it. If you do not save the result, all the analysis will be lost. The best way to save the results of data analysis is by saving them in a query. In the previous lesson, we saw that the advantage of using a query is that it could be saved and its data reviewed over and over again. Besides the ability to save sorted and/or filtered lists, queries provide advanced techniques of performing data analysis. Because they use the SQL, they use a syntax that is not directly available to tables, forms, and reports. In fact, queries provide a good alternative to creating the record source that can be used to populate forms and reports.