Excel

Hi Sarah,

Select the column you want to autofilter.

Go to Data -> Filter -> Autofilter.

You should see the first cell in the column (hopefully the column heading!) now has a drop-down arrow on the right. Click this and it will give you a list of all the entries in the column. You can select a particular entry, and it will filter the colulmn to only show rows with that value.

The other options at the top are (All) which returns to the normal view, and (Custom...) which brings up a dialogue box. In the dialogue box, change both drop-downs to be 'Contains', and select 'OR' radio button. Then type dog in the top right box, and horse in the bottom right box. Click OK and the list should only show rows where 'dog' and 'horse' are present.

Now I realise that you want to also filter for Cat, but for some reason Excel seems to only let you have 2 conditions (I find this extraordinary, but Excel isn't my forte... one of my colleagues may have another way to do this).

What I would suggest is to create another column in your spreadsheet, use autofilter as I've described above (but only filter for 'horse'). Then when the rows are filtered, enter horse in your new column. Use 'fill down' to put horse in all the other matching rows.

Now do the same for 'dog' and 'cat'. At the end, change autofilter to (All) and you should have a new column showing simple 'horse', 'cat' or 'dog'.

You can now use Autofilter on this new column, and change the autofilter to (NonBlanks) which will be the last option in the AutoFilter. This will remove all other rows from view.

Let me know how you get on.

Regards, Rich