Filter using a non-numeric list

**ExcelNewb24** · 12-18-2015, 02:04 PM

Please help!

I have data in an excel worksheet for a few dozen companies. It's a lot of data--more than you would manually want to sort though. The data describes business agreements that those companies engaged in, so naturally the data covers hundreds of companies. My columns show Party A, Party B, dates, agreement type, etc. I am trying to filter this data to only show agreements made with certain companies. Party A will always be a relevant company, but party B might not be.

I have another list with 14 Party B companies I am particularly interested in. I would want to filter all of the rows and end up with data where Party B must contain one of the names from the list of 14 companies. So hypothetically, this list contains "Sandwich Inc.", "PB&J Industries, LTD", International Bunny Machinations Corp.", etc. I would like to be able able to filter out, or somehow reorganize/sort, so that I can easily find rows where Party B contains at least one name from the list.

The next step would be to then create a frequency table for the types of agreements for this filtered data. I think I have this part figured out.

I would greatly appreciate any help. It would easily surpass any Christmas present!

**Sam Capricci** · 12-18-2015, 02:13 PM

If you are trying to use a filter to filter specific company names that are similar but not the same like Sandwich inc, PB&J sandwiches etc you can use the text feature in the filter with either equals, does not equal, begins with, ends with, contains, does not contain or custom filter. Is this what you need?

**ExcelNewb24** · 12-18-2015, 04:22 PM

That could be of use, but I'm not really sure. The data for Party B is manually entered and may contain variations of names. For example, IBM versus International Business Machines, or occasionally adding or dropping Corp/Ltd/Inc. My plan was to add all of these variation to the separate list. I can rearrange the data and figure out what those variations are easily. This is really just one column containing the names of companies I'm interested in (+variations).

The majority of rows in the worksheet describe agreements with companies who are not on the list, hence my need to filter. It's too painstaking to scroll through manually and pull the data I want based on Party B matching a company on my list. It would take a very long time. My hope was that I could somehow create a filter using the list of companies I'm interested in. I'm not sure if this is something you would even use the filter function for--I am not experienced with excel.

Any ideas? And thank you, I appreciate your input.