How to filter horizontally in Google Sheets (Filter columns)

Key Takeaways

in this video i'm going to show you how to filter horizontally in google sheets so usually when people use the filter function they're filtering vertical which means that they're filtering out rows but you can also use it to filter horizontally where you filter out columns so in this first example here in rows one and two we have data that shows the date and the number of visitors that a certain business got on that date and what we're going to do is we're going to filter this data horizontally and we're going to only show the dates where there were more than 100 visitors so i'm going to do this by clicking on cell c4 and then i'm going to type equals filter parenthesis now i'm going to type my source range which are rows 1 and 2 but starting at column c so my source range that contains the data that i want to filter is in the range c1 through 2. so i'm going to type c1 colon 2. now i'm going to type a comma and this is where i enter the condition and the condition is going to be where row 2 is greater than 100 but again we're starting at column c so i'm going to type c 2 colon 2 then a greater than symbol and then the number 100. now i'm going to press enter so now we've filtered horizontally and we're only displaying the dates where the business had more than 100 visitors and we were able to filter horizontally because we specified rows in our ranges rather than columns if we had specified columns our range would not end in a number but it would end in a letter so we're telling google sheets to filter rows one and two where row two is greater than one hundred now if i had wanted to refer to an entire row i would not need to include the letter c before my ranges and this is what it actually looks like when you're just referring to entire rows but the reason that i included the letter c is that i do not want my headers to end up in my filter output so again i specified the column that i wanted my rows to begin at in this case this example shows how many visitors a variety of locations for a certain business received on different days of the week and so let's say that we want to filter this data horizontally so that we can see only saturdays we want to see how many visitors come on each saturday so what we're going to do is begin our filter function in cell c11 by typing equals filter parentheses c1 colon 8 comma c1 colon 1 equals quotation mark saturday quotation mark and then i'm going to press enter and google sheets is now showing us only the columns that say saturday when you're using text as the criteria for your filter function the text has to go inside of quotation marks so again we've told google sheets to filter rows one through eight where row one equals the text saturday so this example has the same source data as the last example but we're going to do something different and we're going to use a cell reference as our criteria so we're going to filter the data in rows one through eight horizontally where row two is greater than 1200 but instead of manually typing the number 1200 into the formula we're going to enter the number 1200 into a cell here in cell b10 and use this cell address b10 as the criteria for our filter function so i'm clicking on cell c10 and then i'm going to type equals filter parentheses c1 colon 8 comma c2 colon 2 greater than and again instead of typing the number 1200 into the formula directly like this which you can do if you want i'm going to type b 10 to refer to cell b10 then i'm going to press enter and now google sheets is showing us only the days that had more than 1200 visitors total and our filter function is referring to cell b10 as the criteria and so if we change the value in cell b10 this will affect the filter function automatically and so if i change 1200 to 1000 our filter results show a lot more days because we're now including any days that had more than 1 000 visitors so if you want to learn more about using the filter function i've linked the article for this video below