While Excel’s find and replace functionality is an empty little functionality that it will allow you to find and replace data, there are other tools and techniques that you can use to extract data and pinpoint data. The tools that I am referring to here are the sorting and filtering tools found in Excel. With these sorting and filtering tools, you can quickly search very large data basis and it pinpoints and extract specific pieces of data without a lot of manual effort.

So, let us go to this next tab, the sorting and filtering data tab to start fresh and let us talk about Excel sorting functionality first. Excel makes sorting a data table very easy. All you have to do is simply click on the column that you want to sort. For example, I will sort the region column and click on the sort and filter command button on the Home Tab and you will see several options here. You can sort A to Z basically meaning that you can sort in ascending order, sort Z to A, sort descending order or apply a custom sort where you can sort on multiple columns at once.

Now, this filter command here is not necessarily as sorting function so we will talk about that later. But, for right now, my plan is to sort my region column in descending order. So, what I would do is simply click sort Z to A and as you can see, the region column is now sorted in descending order and how do I know that. Well, west at the top here and if I press the Control End hot key that we learned earlier, you will see Midwest is at the bottom. So, I am going to go back up to the top here and press Control Home. It takes me up to the top and let us do an example of sorting multiple columns at one time.