Sorting and Filtering Your Data: Excel’s Database Features

Abstract

You hear the term database all the time, even in everyday conversation, but the concept is rarely defined. People tend to rely on a common sense understanding of databases, and that’s usually good enough—and the reality is that even Excel has found the task of deciding what it really means by database a bit troublesome. That doesn’t have to concern us, but on the other hand, since we need to use the term throughout this chapter, we’ll plunge ahead and define a database as a collection of records (i.e., rows) organized into fields, all of which are topped by titles.