Filtering Your Data

A filter is a question you put to the whole set of records behind a list screen: only show me the ones where this field looks like that. It is the most useful thing on a list screen and the one most people use least, because the controls are small and unlabeled. This chapter goes through every part of it: where the controls are, how to build a condition, what each way of comparing actually means, how to combine conditions, and what to do when a filter stops behaving.

What Filtering Is

When you open a list screen the application runs a question against your data and draws the answer. Filtering changes that question. Everything follows from that:

• Filters look at every record you are allowed to see, not only the ones drawn on your screen. If your list is showing 20 of 4,000 orders, a filter searches all 4,000.
• Filters change the record count and the paging. After you apply one, "page 1 of 37" may become "page 1 of 2".
• Filters change what calculations total up and what an export contains. See Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations and Action Buttons And Exporting.
• Filters never change the records themselves. Removing a filter brings everything back.

Filtering is not the same as the small Find on page... box that sits beside it, and not the same as the search in the top bar. The difference matters enough that it has its own section below, and its own chapter: Finding Things.

The Filter Bar

The filter bar is the strip of small controls between the heading of a list screen and the data itself. It normally occupies two lines: the saved-view controls on the first line, and everything else on the second.

Most of the buttons are icon-only, with a thin border and no fill. The tool buttons — Columns, Filter, Group, Merge and Calculations — show a small label above themselves after about a third of a second of hovering. The others rely on your browser's own tooltip, and the refresh button has no label at all.

Your Bar May Look Different

The list above is the default arrangement. Two things change it, and neither is under your control:

• The person who set up your application can rearrange or remove any part of the bar, screen by screen. A colleague working on a different screen may legitimately have no Save button, no Find on page box, or no Group button. Nothing is broken; that screen was laid out differently.
• The whole bar can be switched off for a screen. If there is no bar at all above a list, the screen was configured to show only what its saved view produces.

The bar can also change when you switch the layout of the same screen (table, cards, board, calendar), because each layout carries its own arrangement.

Two more things worth knowing before you start:

• On a screen built on a hand-written query, the Columns, Filter, Group, Merge, Calculations and Save buttons are all hidden. Such a screen can only be narrowed by whatever controls the administrator put on it.
• On a table layout, a column header carries its own small funnel icon with the tooltip Add a filter whenever that column can be filtered. Clicking it is exactly the same as opening the Filter menu and choosing that field — it is usually quicker. The lighter layouts (cards, simple list, board, calendar) have no column headers, so there you always start from the funnel button.

Adding A Condition

1. Click the funnel button (tooltip Filter). A menu opens with a search box reading Start typing... and, under it, an alphabetical list of the fields you may filter on.
2. Type a few letters if the list is long — the list narrows as you type — then click the field name.
3. A new condition chip appears in the bar with its panel already open. Nothing has been filtered yet.
4. In the panel, under the heading Define filter:, pick one of the round options. This is how you want to compare. One option is already selected for you (usually Contains on text, Equal on numbers and dates, Is on choices and links).
5. Choosing an option reveals the value control it needs, below the list — a box to type in, a date box, a dropdown, a pair of boxes for a range, or nothing at all for options like Not set.
6. Fill it in and click Apply filter.

The list reloads and the record count updates. You are returned to page 1.

Example On a list of orders, Jan clicks the funnel, types sta in the menu search box, and clicks Status. The chip opens with Is already selected. He picks Awaiting payment from the dropdown and clicks Apply filter. The list drops from 3,180 orders to 214.

Three points that catch people out:

• Nothing happens until you click Apply filter. The chip appears the moment you pick a field, but the list is deliberately not re-run. A chip on which you never chose a value does nothing at all — and it is still there, doing nothing, if you save the view.
• You can add the same field more than once. The field stays in the Filter menu after you have used it. Two conditions on Due date — one "after", one "before" — are a perfectly normal way to build a window.
• The list of fields you can filter on is not the same as the list of columns on screen. You can filter on a field that is not displayed, and a colleague with different permissions may see more fields in this menu than you do.

Reading And Editing Your Conditions

Each condition is one small button group in the bar, in two or three parts:

• The main button shows the field name in bold followed by the condition in plain words: Status is "Awaiting payment", Amount > 50000, Due date before 2026-06-01. A long field name is shortened to 30 characters. Dates read back in the year-month-day form the filter stored, whatever format the date box showed you.
• A ✕ at the right-hand end removes that whole condition.
• Between them, a small button with a stacked-disks-and-plus icon and the tooltip Add OR filter — see the next section.

To edit a condition, click its main button. The same panel opens with your current choice selected. Change it and click Apply filter again.

To remove one condition, click its ✕. There is no confirmation and the list re-runs immediately.

To remove everything at once there is no button in the bar. Your options are:

• Remove the conditions one at a time with their ✕.
• If your conditions have narrowed the list to nothing, the empty area shows a message and a Remove filters button. That button drops all of your conditions in one go. It only appears when the list is empty.
• Switch saved view in the first-line switcher. That throws away everything you built ad hoc — conditions, sorting, column choices, grouping — with no warning.

Choosing How To Compare

The options you get depend on the kind of field. The tables below use the exact wording you will see. In each table, the first column is the option you pick in the panel; the second is what it means; the third is roughly how it will read back to you on the chip.

On Almost Every Field

These two are the fastest way to find gaps in your data: contacts with no e-mail, projects with no owner, invoices with no due date.

Text Fields

Ordinary text, long text, rich text, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and links.

Contains is the one you want nine times out of ten. nov finds Nováková, Novák and Innovation. Upper and lower case are treated the same, and so are accented and unaccented letters, so novak finds Novák too.

Is asks for the whole value and nothing more: Novák will not find Nováková, because the stored value carries extra text.

Example A company name field holds Nováková s.r.o. Searching Contains novák finds it. Searching Is Nováková does not, because the stored value has more text after it. When a colleague says "the filter finds nothing", they have almost always used Is where they wanted Contains.

There is one extra trick in Contains. Normally your text is looked for anywhere inside the field. If you type a % character yourself, somewhere after the first character, % becomes a wildcard meaning "anything at all", and the automatic "anywhere" behavior switches off — so the rest of your text has to line up with the start and the end of the value:

• Acme% finds values that start with Acme.
• Acme%Prague finds values that start with Acme and end with Prague.

A % typed as the very first character does not count, so %s.r.o. is treated as an ordinary "contains" search rather than an "ends with" one. To anchor the end, put a % in front of something: A%s.r.o. finds values starting with A and ending with s.r.o.

In list and Not in list are covered in Filter Lists below.

Number Fields

Whole numbers, decimals, money and star ratings. Time fields and durations also use this set, so a Time field offers Less than rather than "earlier than".

Warning On a number field, One of values and Not one of values do not give you a picker — they open a plain box marked Expression, and typing 10, 20, 30 into it will not do what you expect. To ask for "one of several numbers" on a number field, use Interval, or add the same field twice and join the two conditions with an alternative (see Combining Conditions). On choice and link fields, the same two options do give you a proper multiple-selection picker and are perfectly safe.

Less than and Greater than exclude the boundary. To catch invoices of exactly 50,000 and above, use Interval with From 50000 and a To value above your largest invoice, or use Greater than 49999.

Date And Time Fields

Dates, dates with a time, year-and-month, and year fields.

The value boxes are your browser's own date boxes, so the layout of day/month/year and the little calendar are whatever your browser and your computer's settings provide. They vary between Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Fields that carry a time as well as a date are stored in universal time and shown in your own time zone, so a filter on "before 1 June" is applied in your time zone, not the server's.

The Ready-Made Periods

Pick Special and a dropdown appears with fourteen entries. They save you from typing two dates and, more importantly, they keep working tomorrow — a saved view built on This month is correct every month.

Note the difference between three of them. This month runs to the end of the month, but This week and This year stop at today. If you want the rest of this week as well, use Between dates with the Monday and the Sunday, or combine After date and Before date.

Example "Which invoices went overdue?" is Due date → Special → In the past (until yesterday), not Before date with today's date typed in — because a typed date is frozen and will be wrong next week, while the ready-made period moves with the calendar. That is what makes it worth saving as a view.

Yes/No Fields

Not set and No are genuinely different on this kind of field. A record where nobody ever touched the box is "not set"; a record where somebody deliberately left it unticked may be stored as "no". If a count looks short, try both.

Single-Choice Fields (Dropdowns And Radio Buttons)

Status, category, country and similar lists of fixed options.

One of values is the everyday workhorse: Status is one of Open, In progress, Waiting.

Note the asymmetry: Is not includes records where the field is blank, but Not one of values does not. If some of your records have no status at all and you want them too, add an alternative condition on Not set.

Multiple-Choice Fields

A field where several options can be ticked at once offers only Not set, Set to anything, One of values and Not one of values. One of values matches a record that has at least one of the options you picked, not all of them.

Fields That Link To Another Record

Customer, assignee, project, owner, related order — anything that points at another record.

The value pickers here fetch the records they offer from the server, in pages, and search as you type. On a big list expect a short pause before the first names appear, and expect to have to type a few letters rather than scroll to find one. That is normal, not a fault.

Is exclusively deserves its own explanation, because it is easy to mistake for Is.

Example Projects can carry several Regions. A project tagged Prague and Brno matches Regions is "Prague" — it is one of them. It does not match Regions is exclusively "Prague", because that condition asks for projects whose only region is Prague. Use it for questions like "which customers buy from us in one country only" or "which tickets are tagged with a single product".

One of values per query compares one selection against another. Instead of naming the records yourself, you point at a saved view of the kind of record the field links to, and the filter uses whatever that view currently contains.

Example Somebody has set up a saved view on Customers called Key accounts. On the Orders list you add Customer → One of values per query → Key accounts. From then on the list shows orders belonging to key accounts — and when a customer is added to or dropped from Key accounts, your order list follows automatically. Naming twenty customers by hand with One of values would need editing every time the account list changed.

Not one of values per query is the same idea inverted: orders belonging to customers who are not key accounts.

If the dropdown of selections is empty, no suitable saved view exists yet for that kind of record; that is something to ask your administrator for.

Files And Images

A file or image field can only be filtered on Not set and Set to anything — in other words, "has an attachment" and "does not". You cannot filter by file name, size or type.

Columns That Count Related Records

Some screens carry a column that shows how many related records a row has — open tasks per project, invoices per customer. That column is filtered like a number: Not set, Set to anything, Equal, Not equal, Less than, Greater than, Interval — all applied to the count. "Projects with more than five open tasks" is Greater than 5.

Fields You Cannot Filter

Some kinds of field have no filtering at all: maps, colors, icons, checklists, fields with a fixed input mask, structured data of certain shapes and a few others. They are usually still listed in the Filter menu, so you can add a chip for one — and the panel then shows a yellow strip reading This filter is currently unavailable.

Remove the chip with its ✕ and use another field. There is nothing to fix on your side.

The "(Advanced)" Entry

At the bottom of most value dropdowns sits an entry reading (Advanced), and some date options are marked "per expression". Choosing them replaces the normal picker with a plain box that expects a formula instead of a value.

These exist for people building the application. They are visible to everyone, but a formula that is wrong does not produce an error — it produces an empty list. Unless somebody has given you the exact text to paste, choose a real value instead.

Combining Conditions

Conditions Must All Be True

Every condition you add narrows the result further. Three chips mean "this and this and this". This is what you want almost all the time, and it is why a list can suddenly go empty: one forgotten chip is still cutting everything away.

Adding An Alternative

To ask for "this or that", you do not add a second chip — you add a branch to an existing one. Click the small stacked-disks-and-plus button near the right-hand end of a chip, just before its ✕ (tooltip Add OR filter), pick a field from the list headed Available filters, and a second button appears inside the same chip. Fill it in and apply.

That chip now means "the first condition or the second". Everything inside one chip is an alternative; separate chips are still combined with "and".

Example A support team wants tickets that are urgent in either sense: priority High, or belonging to a key account. They build one chip on Priority — Is "High" — then use its Add OR filter button to add a branch on Customer — One of values per query → Key accounts. Then they add a separate chip Status — Not one of values → Closed, Canceled.

The result reads: (priority is High or customer is a key account) and status is neither Closed nor Canceled.

The Limits Of Combining

• There is no deeper nesting and no way to draw brackets. Everything you can express has the shape "(alternatives) and (alternatives) and …". A question like "(A and B) or (C and D)" cannot be built here — split it into two saved views, or ask for a purpose-built view.
• The branch you add is stuck to its chip. Removing the chip removes its branches too.
• You usually cannot delete a single branch on its own. A branch has its own small red delete button only when the branch is on a field that links to other records; otherwise the only way out is to delete the whole chip with its ✕ and rebuild it.

Because of the last point, it pays to add branches last, once the rest of your conditions are settled.

Filtering Through A Linked Record

When a condition sits on a field that links to another record, its panel has an extra bar at the top with a button reading Filter on nested property?. Clicking it lists the fields of the linked record, and choosing one turns your condition into a question about that record instead.

Example On the Orders list you want orders from customers in Slovakia. There is no country on the order itself — the country is on the customer. Add a condition on Customer, click Filter on nested property?, choose Country, and the condition becomes a question about the customer's country: pick Is "Slovakia" and apply. The chip reads Customer followed by the country condition.

Two things to know:

• Choosing a linked field clears anything you already typed into that chip. Pick the field first, then the value.
• There is no button to step back out of a linked field. To undo it, remove the chip and start again.

The list of linked fields respects your permissions, so a colleague may be offered fields there that you are not.

Quick Filters

Beside the standard buttons, an administrator can place ready-made filter controls on a screen. They come in four shapes:

• A single button that switches one condition on and off. It is outlined when off and solid when on.
• A search box with its own placeholder text, sometimes with a magnifier button beside it. Press Enter or click the magnifier. Some of them fire on their own a moment after you stop typing.
• A row of mutually exclusive buttons — one gray label and several options, of which only one can be active.
• A row of tick-box buttons, each with a square or a ticked square, of which several can be active at once.

Quick filters are worth using when they exist: they are shaped for the screen and they take one click. Four things to know about how they behave:

• A quick filter is combined with your own conditions, never instead of them. If a quick filter is on and you also add a condition, both apply.
• A quick filter does not appear as a chip. There is no ✕ for it in the row of conditions — you turn it off with the same control you turned it on with.
• A quick filter that fires on its own as you type does a full round trip to the server on each fire, so the list flickers and redraws. That is different from the instant Find on page... box.
• Quick filters survive switching saved view, whereas your own conditions do not. If a screen still looks narrowed after you switched views, look at the quick filters first.

Filter Lists

A filter list is a named list of values kept in the application — "Our warehouse codes", "Blocked domains", "Regions we ship to". The In list and Not in list options match a field against every value in it at once.

Example Purchasing keeps a list called Approved suppliers with 60 company numbers. On the Invoices screen, Supplier number → Not in list → Approved suppliers shows every invoice from a supplier who is not approved. When the list is updated centrally, the filter follows — nobody has to edit 60 values in a saved view.

What you can expect:

• The dropdown offers the lists you may use: the ones you created, plus public ones shared with your role. You will not see other people's private lists.
• Lists are managed on their own screen, usually reached from the administration area, titled Filter Lists. It is only open to people who have been given permission for it. If you have it, you can create a list by giving it a title and pasting the values one per line, with an option to force them to lower case, and either keep it Private or share it with chosen roles.
• Matching is on the whole value, not part of it. A list containing Praha matches a field holding exactly Praha, not Praha 4.
• Deleting a filter list silently breaks every filter that used it. The application says so when you delete one — "Filters that reference it will stop matching." A saved view built on a deleted list does not complain; it simply returns nothing. If a familiar view suddenly goes empty, a deleted filter list is a strong suspect.
• Whether Not in list also brings back records where the field is empty depends on the kind of field — text fields include them, number fields do not. When blanks matter, check with a separate Not set condition.

"Find On Page…" Is Not A Filter

The small box in the filter bar reading Find on page... hides rows that are already drawn on your screen. It does not ask your data anything.

• It searches only the rows already drawn. If you are on page 1 of 37, it cannot find anything on page 12.
• It does not change the record count, the paging, the totals or the export.
• On a table it matches within a single cell: typing Acme 2024 finds nothing if Acme is in one column and 2024 in another. On cards it matches anywhere in the card.
• It only sees columns that are actually displayed.
• It does nothing on a board or a calendar, because those layouts have no rows for it to hide.
• It resets whenever the list redraws for any other reason.
• It can stop working if you type a bracket, an asterisk or a plus sign, because those characters have a special meaning to it. Delete the character and it recovers.

Use it to pick a row out of a short list you are already looking at. For anything else, use a filter. The three kinds of searching are compared side by side in Finding Things.

Filtering By Tags And Folders

Tags and folders are two more ways to narrow a list, and they work alongside the conditions in this chapter rather than replacing them: a tag selection and a filter condition apply together. Both are covered in Tags And Folders.

Where Your Filters Live

Everything you build is carried in the address of the page, which has three consequences worth knowing while you are filtering:

• The browser Back button steps through your filter history. If you narrowed too far, Back returns you to the previous set of conditions. Forward goes the other way.
• Reloading the page keeps your filters. So does bookmarking it, and so does sending the address to a colleague — although a colleague only ever sees the records and fields they are allowed to see, so their row count may differ from yours. That is correct behavior, not a fault; see Why Your Screen Differs From A Colleague's.
• A list shown inside a pop-up window keeps its filter state on the window rather than in the address, so there is nothing to copy from the address bar.

Sharing the address and saving what you built are covered in Saved Views.

When A Filter Stops Working

None of these produce an error message on the page. The usual symptom of a broken filter is an empty list with no explanation, which is why "remove the chips one at a time and see which one is responsible" is the fastest diagnosis you have.

Worked Examples

Overdue Unpaid Invoices For One Customer

1. Open the Invoices list.
2. Funnel → Customer. In the panel choose Is, start typing the customer name in the picker, select it, click Apply filter.
3. Funnel → Status. Choose Not one of values, tick Paid and Canceled, click Apply filter.
4. Funnel → Due date. Choose Special, pick In the past (until yesterday), click Apply filter.

The bar now reads roughly: Customer is "Nováková s.r.o." · Status is not one of values... · Due date In the past (until yesterday). Conditions that hold several values summarize themselves as "is not one of values..." rather than listing them, so click a chip when you need to see exactly what is in it.

Two refinements worth making:

• Add a Calculations → Sum on the amount column to see what the customer owes in total. Calculations are covered in Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.
• If some invoices have no status at all, step 3 leaves them out. Add an alternative to that chip: Add OR filter → Status → Not set.

Tasks Assigned To Me, Due This Week

1. Open the Tasks list.
2. Funnel → Assignee → Is → start typing your own name → select yourself → Apply filter.
3. Funnel → Due date → Special → This week → Apply filter.
4. Funnel → Status → Not one of values → tick Done and Canceled → Apply filter.

Remember that This week runs from Monday up to and including today. If you want the rest of the week too, replace step 3 with Between dates, putting Monday's date in From and Sunday's in To — but then you must re-edit it next week, which is exactly the kind of thing a ready-made period saves you from.

This is the classic candidate for saving: save it as My week and mark it with the star so it opens by default.

Contacts With No Phone Number

1. Open the Contacts list.
2. Funnel → Phone → Not set → Apply filter. There is no value to enter.
3. Optionally narrow further: Funnel → Active → Yes → Apply filter, so you only see contacts still worth chasing.
4. Add the E-mail column from the Columns button so the list is usable as a call sheet.

Not set means the field was never filled in. A contact whose phone field holds a space, a dash or the word "none" counts as filled and will not appear here. If you suspect people have been doing that, run a second pass: one chip on Phone using Contains with the placeholder they used, for example -, will collect them.

Tips And Gotchas

• Build one condition at a time and watch the count. If the list empties, the condition you just added is the culprit. This is faster than any other way of debugging a filter.
• A chip with no value chosen does nothing — but it is still saved with the view and will confuse whoever inherits it. Remove empty chips before saving.
• Negative conditions and empty fields do not behave uniformly. On most fields, "Is not", "Not equals" and "Not contains" also return records where the field is empty; on a choice field, "Not one of values" does not. "Not in list" goes one way on text fields and the other on number fields. When blanks matter, check with a Not set condition rather than assuming.
• "Less than" and "Greater than" exclude the number you typed. "Interval" includes both ends.
• Adding a condition from the Filter menu, and removing one, both return you to page 1. That is deliberate; page 7 of the old result rarely means anything in the new one. Re-applying a chip you were already using leaves you where you were, which on a much shorter result can look like an empty page — go back to page 1 and check.
• Lists do not refresh themselves. After a colleague changes something, your filtered list is still the answer from when it was drawn. Use the circular-arrows Refresh button at the right of the bar to re-run the same question against current data.
• Filtering a big list can be slow, especially with several conditions on linked records or with calculations switched on. Large Lists And Performance explains what costs time and how to split a question up.
• A condition in one list does not affect another list on the same page. Applying a filter deliberately leaves other lists alone.
• Switching saved view discards everything ad hoc — conditions, sorting, columns, grouping, the page you were on — without asking. Save first if you want to keep it.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

You cannot change any of the following yourself. Phrasing the request around the field and the screen makes it much quicker to act on.

• "Please make Region filterable on the Projects screen." Use this when a field is on the record but missing from the Filter menu.
• "Please put a quick filter for only mine on the Tasks screen." One button beats three conditions, every day.
• "Please create a shared filter list of our approved supplier numbers." Then everyone can use In list instead of typing them out.
• "Please create a saved view of Key accounts on Customers." That is what makes One of values per query available to the rest of us.
• "What is this screen locked to?" Ask when the row count does not match the visible conditions.
• "Please turn the filter bar back on for the Deliveries screen." Ask when a screen has no bar at all.
• "Can the Notes field be filtered? The panel says it is unavailable." Sometimes a field can be changed to a filterable kind; sometimes it cannot, and it is worth knowing which.

More requests of this shape are collected in What To Ask Your Administrator For.

Related Chapters

• Saved Views
• List Screens
• Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations
• Tags And Folders
• Finding Things