Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 7, 2024)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Excel in Microsoft 365, and 2021
Konai has a worksheet that has over 25,000 rows in it. He would like to apply a filter to this data, but was told by a friend that Excel has a 10,000-row limit on filtering. He wonders if that is true and, if so, how he can filter all of the rows without the need to break the table into multiple chunks.
The good news is that you probably won't have to break the table into chunks. The limit isn't a 10,000-row barrier, but applies to unique values in the filtering. Let's say, for instance, that you want to filter by a column that has a date in it or a part number. If there aren't more than 10,000 unique values in the column, then filtering will work just fine. In other words, the 10,000-item limit deals with how many unique items that Excel can display in the drop-down filtering list, the one that appears when you click the down-arrow at the right of a column heading. This is made clear in the following Microsoft page, in the limit for "items displayed in filter drop-down lists":
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3
Since the latest versions of Excel allow over a million rows in a worksheet, it is possible (but not probable) that there could be over 10,000 unique values in a column. If that is the case, then understand that you can still do advanced filtering of the data with no problem. If you want to know more about advanced filtering, then this ExcelTip will be helpful:
https://tips.net/T7851
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13943) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Excel in Microsoft 365, and 2021.
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2024-12-07 22:22:26
Tomek
I wonder if for such huge data set it wouldn't be better to use a database program.
2024-12-07 07:38:24
Alex Blakenburg
You don't need to resort to Advanced Filtering unless you want to use more complex filtering criteria. Only the drop down list is limited to 10,000 items. You can still enter the value into the filter search box or use the Number Filters or Text Filters whichever is applicable based on the data type in the column. (for numbers comparative filters such as =, >, <, between etc, for Text =, Begins with, Contains etc.) I am using MS 365
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