drop down for sorting data

[jshankar]

hi I have a lsit of about 2000 organisms. There are several repeats. for example by removing duplicates there are only 139 unique names.

I have an excel sheet with data about these organisms, but since they are all quite mixed up, i would like to order them and study them as groups of organisms..or pick one organism type and go back to the freezer number and fetch the one I want for eg...

for example, if i want excel to show the data for only the MRSA bugs in the full list how can i best achieve this. My first row is a fixed row that has the title for each column ...in this case 'organism id'. How can i put a drop down near this title cell to display the 139 individual entries to choose from and choose eg MRSA and make the spread sheet show the data for all of the MRSA on that list.

What I did was this:
I put the unique id names into one list on a separate sheet and called that whole colum orgid.

then I went back to my original sheet with all the data and chose the column 'organism id', went to data> data validation

in the settings tab I allowed LIST and in the source i input "= orgid"...

This just makes the whole column get drop down and I can CHANGE individual values from a drop down. What I want is the title to have a drop down and sort the data to return the value from a drop down that is in the entire list...

Is this possible? am I even making sense to people?
Cheers
Jay

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

Welcome to MrExcel.

You can use AutoFilter:

http://www.contextures.com/xlautofilter01_2003.html

 

[jshankar]

oooooo...
thats sorted it!no pun intended!
Theres always something easy to do first ...

Thanks a million!