Chapter 8. Tables: List Management Made Easy

8. Tables: List Management Made Easy

• The Basics of Tables

• Sorting and Filtering a Table

Excel's Grid-like Main Window Gives You Lots Of Freedom to organize your information. As you've seen in the chapters so far, tables of data can assume a variety of shapes and sizesfrom complex worksheets that track expenses, to a simple list of dishes your guests are bringing to a potluck dinner.

Some tables are quite sophisticated, with multiple levels, subtotals, and summary information. But in many cases, your table consists of nothing more than a long list of data, with a single row at the top that provides descriptive column headings. These types of tables are so common that Excel provides a set of features designed exclusively for managing them. These tools let you control your tables in stylesorting, searching, and filtering your information with just a couple of mouse clicks. But before you can use any of these tools, you have to convert your garden-variety table into a structured table .

In this chapter, you'll learn more about what, exactly, a structured table is, how to create one, and how to make use of all its features and frills.

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Note: In previous versions of Excel, the tables feature was called lists . It's still the same feature, but Microsoft developers were so pleased with the improvements they added in Excel 2007 that they decided it deserved a whole new name .

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