Filtering Columns

Note that if you want to use Custom Views to save your "filtering" as described in the tip, this will only work with workbooks that have NO TABLES in them (I am referring to the "Table" formatting of cell ranges). For some inexplicable reason, Microsoft has ignored to fix this for the past 10-20 years or so ... rendering the Custom Views functionality basically useless in most work environments I've come across.

If you just want to LOOK at the data, but without the exraneous content in some columns (OR want to allow various users to just look at some columns, not all), and make NO changes, the following will work in a filtering manner:

=INDEX(A1:E5,SEQUENCE(COUNTA(A1:A5),1),K1:M1)

where A1:E5 is your data and column A has entries in every row. The range K1:M1, or larger or smaller, has the column numbers you want to show. It will also control the order in which the columns are displayed if that is a good thing (or a bad thing to remember). By the way, using INDEX() this way allows it to be the lookup range for a VLOOKUP() that has to "look left" as you can use it to reverse the order of the two relevant columns. If K1:M1 had 1..4..5, you'd get columns 1, 4, and 5 in that order. If it had 5..1..4, you'fd get them in THAT order.

So insert columns between any two columns by inserting a column, etc. with adding past the rightmost being a little tricky with inserting, then copying the moved value to the newly inserted cell and editing the new last cell. Tricky-ish, but easy-ish.

So, look, but don't edit.

Again though, you can give people viewing access and control their rights very finely — you'd just need a new range of cells to hold each user's unique column rights. Copy a standard one, and edit. If you build a bit of automation so that actual editing is done via forms, not in the material presented like this, they can edit too. One could even set this up as a middle step they never have access to and use FILTER() to present the table they are allowed to see to them, which would allow setting up row filtering via the function rather than via the filtering capability. Everyone would have their own view though so using the filtering capability would not disrupt others, nor sorting their third level view. The forms controlling the editing would keep your rules and concerns paramount since you'd be writing them, controlling how they were carried out, not the user.