Criteria in IDEA Vs MS Excel Filters

Hi Group Members,

We use Filters in MS-Excel regularly and it plays an important part in extracting records from one worksheet to another worksheet in Excel.

Once a Filter is applied in MS-Excel and it serves the purpose of extraction, the user promptly removes the filter and moves to the next task. The Filter once removed, if needed to be brought back once again, has to be written once again in MS-Excel.

In IDEA, Criteria is the parallel of the MS-Excel Filter. A Criteria can be written in IDEA as an example to capture/extract retirement of Fixed Assets where a loss has been incurred on retirement or say depreciation has not been computed for the broken period up and until the retirement date.

Now the Criteria is entered through the Equation Editor in IDEA, filtered records extracted to a new database in IDEA and Criteria cleared to get back the original database. Up and until this point it is a task similar to MS-Excel. But after you clear the Criteria if you go back to Criteria on the right side of the IDEA screen under the Properties toolbar and right click on Criteria you will see your saved Criteria displayed. This precludes the need to write the Criteria from scratch and makes Equation Building in IDEA convenient and repeatable with a quick learning and application cycle.

Kind Regards

Group Admin Team