Datasheet

Tricks of the Trade: Sorting and Filtering for On-the-fly Analysis
There is inherent functionality within Access that can assist you in performing
quick, impromptu data analysis.
SORTING
It is significantly safer to sort data in an Access table than in an Excel
spreadsheet. One of the potential problems with sorting data in Excel has to do
with the free-form nature of a spreadsheet, which allows you to inadvertently
sort only one column in your dataset. With Access, you do not have to worry
about the impact on presentation when you sort. The data is separate from the
presentation.
Open up a table in the Datasheet view and select the column you want to
sort. That is, click the gray box with the column name once. This action should
highlight the entire column. Once your column is highlighted, right-click and
then select Sort Ascending or Sort Descending from the popup menu shown in
Figure 1-8.
Figure 1-8 From the right-click menu, you can choose to
sort a column in ascending or descending order.
FILTERING
Another extremely useful table function is Filter By Selection and Filter
Excluding Selection. The idea behind these filters is that you will click a single
data value in a record. Choosing Filter By Selection then hides all records that
do not have that particular value in that particular column. This can be an
excellent method to perform fast analysis.
Suppose you have a list of employees and you want to quickly know how
many are in California. Find a record—any record—whose state is California,
then click in the State column of that record. After filtering by selection, only
records with California as the state will be visible. The non-California records
are not deleted; they are just temporarily hidden by the filter.
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