This has happened to me before and you tend to see "Ready" when your
spreadsheet has lots of calculations. Change calculation from Auto to Manual
(Tools, Options, Caluculation) and you should be able to see the results.

"Al" wrote:

I have Excel 2002 running on two different machines and they display
different messages on the left side of the status bar when I use the filter.
One shows how many rows are filtered out of the total (which I want to see)
and the other just says "Ready". I thought this might be controlled in the
Options dialog box, but I don't see it. How is this controlled?