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I know how to do AutoFilter in Excel, which is good when I want to look at a single value in a spreadsheet list. But what I want is a list of unique values (names of counties) that I can print out! I can copy it down by hand if I click on the filter widget, which is clumsy and slow, and also, since I'm reviewing who gets what Texas counties, I can have a list of 50 or more to copy out by hand.
Is there a better way? I tried typing "find unique values in a column" in the Excel Help, but all it did is tell me about AutoFilter, which I pretty much know about already. I don't need to go into Criteria, since that looks like something you use to FIND things, not get a handy list of the values you want to FIND.
Yours Truly, Tearing At The Hairroots and Cursing Bill Gates
So you have a whole bunch of county 'A', a whole bunch of county 'C', etc. and you just want a list of 'A', 'C', etc?
If that's it, sort the counties. Then select the counties, along with the header for the counties and go to Data / Subtotal, and then select "at each change in county" then click OK. Then collaps all the sections (click on the '-').
I think there must be a better way, as this is designed for subtotals, but it might get you what you want.
eta: This is very easy in a database such as Access.
sigh
So far I've locked up Excel trying to do that. I may have a bit too many rows... though that was my problem in the first place.
Texas has far too many counties, by the way. Especially because a lot of them seem to have about 150 students in them. To a girl from NJ, which has a sensible number of counties this seems very foreign indeed.
Nope.
sigh
I'm working on converting the spreadsheet into Notes, which I DO have.
Can one run SQL queries against Excel data in Excel?
Theoretically, you could write a SQL parser/interpreter in VBA, but no.
Yeah, I just discovered that you can run queries against external data (in SQL Server), but that's it.
I think a lot of people use spreadsheets (especially Excel) for data that a database would be more suitable for. Which is understandable, as I think there are a lot more people with spreadsheet experiance than database experience.
