My goal is to have what ever cell that is currently being selected, stored as a String variable. Also the column ( ex: c converted to 3) converted into a field integer and stored as an integer variable. Using these two variables I'd like to use them in an autofilter.

What have I done so far? I attempted to record a macro so that I can tweek it. ( ex: I clicked on record-macro, right clicked on a non-empty-cell and copied it's contents, expanded one of the auto-filter field/categories and pasted the contents into the excel-2010-auto-filter search-box. Clicked ok, then clicked the stop macro.

The problem, is that this just made a filter that arbitrarily copied that aforementioned non-empty-cell, it never stored the value, or used the cell as a reference, it just independently made a string composed of the cells contents and searched for that. This is the actual result:

Sub AutoFilterBySelection()
'
' AutoFilterBySelection Macro
'
' Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+A
'
Range("L2308").Select
Selection.Copy

ActiveSheet.Range("$A$1:$AF$2500").AutoFilter Field:=12, Criteria1:= _
"=30 % ~* PRE-CLEAN & SWEEP", Operator:=xlOr, Criteria2:= _
"=PRE-CLEAN & SWEEP"

End Sub

How do I store what ever cell is currently selected as a string, to use in an auto filter? How do I tell the auto-filter what field that current-selection belongs to? Is it possible to parse a range into an integer for use as a field number in the auto filter? Why is vba so much more difficult than java or c# XD.