Excel Advanced Filter: How to Use “Does Not Contain”

by Tutor Aspire February 17, 2016

You can use the following syntax to filter for rows that do not contain specific text in an Excel Advanced Filter:

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The following examples show how to use this function in two different scenarios:

Suppose we have the following dataset that shows the total sales of certain products in certain regions for a company:

Now suppose we’d like to filter for rows where the Region does not contain “East.”

To do so, we can define a criteria range:

Next, we can click the Data tab and then click the Advanced Filter button:

We’ll choose A1:C17 as the list range and F1:F2 as the criteria range:

Once we click OK, the dataset will be filtered to only show rows where the Region does not contain “East“:

Suppose we have the following dataset that shows the total sales of certain products in certain regions for a company:

Now suppose we’d like to filter for rows where the Region does not contain “East” or “West.”

To do so, we can define a criteria range:

Next, we can click the Data tab and then click the Advanced Filter button.

We’ll choose A1:C17 as the list range and F1:G2 as the criteria range:

Once we click OK, the dataset will be filtered to only show rows where the Region does not contain “East” or “West“:

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel: