Microsoft Excel: Count Visible Rows
The Scenario
Imagine the following scenario. You have gathered a prospect list of potential customers. You want to be able to quickly assess the number of customers based on certain criteria. To complicate the scenario your data is composed of 5,000 records.
The Task
Imagine now you want to filter your data by state. In this case we will use California, or CA. You can begin to see how hard it is to determine the number of filtered results on large data sets.
The Solution
Luckily for us excel has included a function to allow us to easily count the results in situation such as these. The subtotal function allows for a variety of tasks to be preferred on only visible rows. In this case we will use function "103" for counta.
The Conclusion
We have now determined that there 817 of are 5000 potential customers are in California. We can continue to filter the data to our liking and the number of results will be updated real time. Go ahead give it a try on a spreadsheet of your own you will soon notice how useful this function truly is.