Help Filtering Data

[vdub09]

Tossing this out to the Excel geniuses of the community.

I need help creating a spreadsheet where I can associate an author’s statement to multiple keywords. I’ll have hundreds of individual statements with multiple keyword associations for each statement. I need to be able to search for those individual statements based on a combination of keywords. For example, say I have 800 statements on the subject of Volkswagen, each written by different authors on various dates and having multiple keyword associations (i.e. small, red, reliable, understeer, etc)...I need to be able to filter to find every statement with white, sporty, reliable, economic, etc. keyword associations.

I have seen advanced filtering options but I’m just not sure that’s the right approach with text related data sets. Please help!

 

[ardykav]

You have a few ways of tackling it really. How many key words? One way is have all the key words running across the top row after the dataset and then to a find function below it then work off a series of slicers to look up statements that have those keywords

 

[vdub09]

I’d like to not be limited to key words. Maybe even add more as I continue to add reference statements. I’m going to give this a shot and see if I can understand your solution correctly. Thanks!

 

[vdub09]

The other thing is...some of the key words may not actually be in the statement. They might just be categorical ties to the statement. Like, ”interior” if the statement is in regards to something about the interior of the vehicle but doesn’t actually state that.

 

[ardykav]

Well you could have two key words together like “leather interior”, if you could post your file it would give a better idea of what you want to achieve

 

[vdub09]

Unfortunately, the actual information is private, intellectual property but I could give a more direct idea. Essentially, I am going back through a couple years of journal entries for a client that is an author. What I am attempting to do is create a searchable repository of their journal entries. The entries are maybe 3 - 5 sentence long statements. Each one may have several key words/relational ideas that will be used to help sort and filter out entries in order to target different topics, subjects, moods, etc. Does that make sense? I stalled fairly quickly in Excel. My thought was to put the journal entry statements into column A, the date in column B and then keywords in subsequent columns. Each entry would have its own row. I got about 4 rows in and realized it wouldn’t work.