Google Sheets: How to Filter Vertically Merged Cells

1
votes

I've come looking for help regarding this issue. I'm a teacher, and am trying to help my students get all their documents together for university applications. Google Sheets tell me that I'm not able to filter cells containing vertical merges, but I want to filter by the earliest application deadline (column G) so I know which student I have to chase up first, second, third, etc., without losing the rest of the data in the row.

Does anyone know a good way of doing this? I've created a sample of my spreadsheet: here.

Thanks in advance.

2
google-sheetsfilteringgoogle-sheets-formulaformulaspreadsheet
It's a bad practice to use merged cells this way. I would recommend you to create a column for each Necessary Document and use the solution that @doubleunary has proposed. - fullfine

2 Answers

1
votes

Try Insert > New sheet and this formula in cell A1 of the new sheet:

=query('2021'!A1:Z, "where G is not null order by G", 1)

The sorted list is for reference only. You will need to continue to do your editing in the 2021 sheet.

0
votes

I would split the data between a couple of sheets.

In the first sheet you'd have important data that can be seen at a glance and filtered easily, like student names, universities and deadlines.

In the second sheet (which you can link by student name or id) you can put extra info like necessary documents, urls etc - something like this.

Alternatively keep all the info in one sheet but don't use split columns or rows - it isn't conducive for sorting, filtering and viewing data (and what's the point of data if you can't analyse it?)