Grouping/Sorting Rowa based on designated Criteria (w/o using Tables)

[dharmon]

Hello,

For some reason I cannot attach my excel sheet or even an image of it, so I will try to explain my predicament without being able to show an example.

I have a Gantt Chart for house projects. Each House (labeled house 1, house 2, etc.) has criteria next to it to help define the projects. Examples of this criteria are Location, Cost Range, Number of Bedrooms, bathrooms, stories and etc. After the criteria section, the Gantt chart starts and shows the day by day project status for the next year.

Each House Project is shown using three rows. The Gantt Chart has text boxes to help indicate what the status is.

For many reasons, I cannot use a Table.

I would like to have a free floating "Key" where I could select criteria and have the Gantt chart only show the criteria I have selected (i.e. if I select California, it will only show those projects with the California designation, and if I select another criteria, say 3 bedrooms, I would only see 3 bedroom houses in California).

With this, one would be able to hide the projects/rows they do not wish to see.

One problem I foresee based on the basic Grouping ability in the Data tab, is that when you group and hide rows, Text Boxes do not hide with the row, they stack on top of each other.

House 1: Rows 3-5 (3 bedrooms, 2 stories, California, etc.)
House 2: Rows 6-8 (5 bedrooms, 2 stories, Wisconsin, etc.)
House 3: Rows 9-11 (5 bedrooms, 3 stories, California, etc.)

Gantt Chart starts on Column E. All previous columns are used for house project names/criteria.

Please help me create a key where I can automatically hide rows based on criteria as indicated in cells within the rows that are to be hidden.

Thank you kindly,

[dharmon]

So I was able to achieve what I wanted through adding a filter and incorporating the format painter to enable the filter to work with merged cells.

Now my only problem is that when the rows are hidden, the Text Boxes do not hide with them, they stack on each other and create quite the mess.