advanced filter failing to "filter"

I don't use filters much. When I have used them and they have completely failed like you describe, it has always been due to some misunderstanding on my part of how the criteria range works. Once I get the criteria correctly entered into the criteria range and the criteria range correctly defined in the advanced filter dialog, the advanced filter has always worked.

Can you provide a more detailed description of what you have and what you are doing when the advanced filter fails like this? Perhaps a sample file you can upload to the forum? If you can help us recreate this behavior in our own copies of Excel, maybe we can see what is going on.

No idea what other mistakes were during my operation of the advanced filter and as a result, I don't know what my misunderstanding would have been (on this, how (or where) could I find out more regarding how the criteria range works)

There are a few tutorials out there. This one, for example: https://www.contextures.com/xladvfilter01.html The most memorable "did not filter at all" that recall was one where I wanted to have an or criteria (multiple rows in the criteria range), so I defined the criteria range to have multiple rows. However, in this scenario, if I left a row blank (because maybe I only needed one criteria for that particular filter), Excel's advanced filter seemed to interpret the blank row as "include records that contain anything", and it did not actually filter anything. If I had few criteria than originally envisioned, I needed to define the criteria range to include only the rows with actual criteria.

I agree that the problem is most likely operation specific rather than sample specific. However, we need a sample of data in order to test out different operations. We are often lazy and don't want to make up our own dummy data set for testing on. So you can help us help you by providing some kind of sample data set (even if you pull a data set from one of Excel's help files or even the sample file from the contextures tutorial). Then describe the exact operations you are performing on that sample data set to get the "did not filter anything" result, so we can attempt to replicate the behavior in our Excel installations. Maybe then we can help you understand what is going on (and why copying to a blank workbook seems to magically fix the problem).