Thread: Advanced filter for <> several text strings

Hello everyone. I apologize in advance if my lack of experience with excel makes my question seem ridiculous.

i have a lot of data which i am going to be running an advanced filter on. One of the criteria i am trying to filter for is a list of text values that i want to make sure a row does not contain. Lets say for example I have a list of 2 text values in column "symbols" that i would like to omit in my filtered results, "abc" and "xyz".
As of now I can only set up a criteria to omit one of those.

Symbol
<>abc

this works right now.


But if i try to put <>xyz in the cell immediately under there, I thought its supposed to be filtering for symbol that does not equal abc or xyz, but instead it doesnt filter anything out. I think it may be a syntax error or something else that I am doing wrong. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Ideally, I would like to be able to filter out a list of text values that I keep in another column. Like lets say today I wanted to omit "abc" "xyz" and "lmnop" and I would have the advanced filter criteria just reference that list of values as what I would like to filter out. Except there would probably be a list of at least 20 to 30 values, that change over time, so it would be much easier to just keep it all neat in one column that I can edit as I need to.

I hope this is not as difficult to do as it is to explain what I am trying to do in this forum. Thanks in advance to any excel experts who can help me.

-ilscfn

Thanks for the response pike.

I now see that I can do it this way. Thanks for the help.

As I said in my original post though, I will end up having to filter out 20 or more symbols, that change frequently. Because of this, if there is a way to have it reference a list of symbols and omit any rows with those symbols, that would make it a lot easier than going and adding and subtracting many cells in a long row of filter criteria, with the qualifier <> ahead of it. Any ideas of how to do this? thanks.

ils

No, instead i would like to filter for exact matches, so

<>a, ab, cba


the result of which would be dcd, because it was the only one i didnt filter out.

or even better, have a list of filtered for symbols, like

Filteredsymbols
a
ab
cba

that the filter would reference, and result dcd.