The AutoFilter tool in Microsoft Excel enables you to filter a large list of data to see only the records you want to see. It is a popular everyday tool for working with large Excel lists and helping you to find records and analyse your data.

This tutorial looks at three relatively unknown uses of the AutoFilter tool.

If you are storing pictures in a list in Excel, then you need to make sure that you can sort the pictures in the list. Unless a few steps are taken in advance you will not be able to sort pictures in Excel.

Imagine you have a list of products and you have a picture of that product in one of the columns. When you sort the list by product name, price, or number sold you will want the pictures to move with the appropriate product.
There are two things you need to ensure are setup before this can happen;

Got asked in training yesterday if it was possible to select all the blanks cells in a sheet, and if there was a quick way to do it.

It was a large range of cells that contained blanks. These empty cells represented missing data that required filling in. By selecting all the blank cells it would be easier to step through the list and update the records.

1. Select the cells where you want to look for blanks
2. Click the Find & Select button on the Home tab of the Ribbon
3. Select Go To Special from the menu

This special Go To area of Excel is awesome. It allows you to select only special aspects of the currently selected cells such as only the visible cells, the current region or those with comments.

4. Select Blanks in the dialogue box and click Ok

The empty cells are selected. Every time you type something into a cell and press Enter it will take you to the next blank cell.

To make this process quicker, you could record a macro in Excel that selects all the blank cells. This can then be assigned to a button on the toolbar. The next time you need to run this task, you can do so with the click of a button.

A common question I hear when training Excel or browsing the forums is whether it is possible to view more than one worksheet in a book at the same time.

Well yes there is.

There is no real set feature for this task. It involves arranging windows just as you would with multiple workbooks.

With the workbook open and selected;