Orgelizer wrote:
I've encountered this problem both with Excel 2003 and 2007. Attempting the
same thing in Access works fine. I'd sure appreciate it if someone could
tell me why it doesn't work in Excel and does in Access.

Specifically, I have a spreadsheet where data in all but the date column is
formatted as text. That means "John", W3B29AWV", and "0502" are all text
fields. When I do either an AutoFilter or an Advanced Filter, if I look for
a specific thing, the proper results are returned. Using a "does not equal"
in AutoFilter, or < in Advanced Filter works most of the time. However, if
I select a "does not equal" out of the AutoFilter, or use < as criteria in
the Advanced filter, for the field that contains all numbers (0502 in this
example), the criteria is totally ignored. What is it about a "text" field
that is entirely numbers that the programs don't like.

As I've said, I've generated a query in Access and successfully had it work,
but it doesn't in Excel. Any info you could provide, either as to why it
doesn't work, or how to make it work, would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any and all assistance.


You could try "does not contain" instead of "does not equal". That seems to
work properly (or maybe that should be phrased "the way you want it to") with
leading zeros.

Of course, that could lead to other problems, because 0502 and 305023 both
contain 0502 and you may not want to filter out 305023.