Keeping blank rows when sorting

Originally Posted by EdMac

I presume you have groups of data separated by blanks and you want to sort within the sets.

I think you can only do this by sorting each set of rows individually - Excel would not know where to put blanks otherwise

I have an idea, but don't know much about changing the filter settings. So perhaps you know.

Is it possible to have it filter for things in common?

For example, you have 2 variations of inputs, and create a 3rd.
a,
b,
a, b

The idea being that you would make the "blank" row a, b and change the font color to make it appear hidden.

Then when you select either a, or b, it could also recognize either value in the "blank" and leave that in the chart? The challenge would be if there were a lot of variations, then that blank cell would need to contain all of them.

Here is a model of what I mean for the filter allowing the "blank" rows. Maybe it's better to refer to them as the universal value row?

This thread wasn't started discussing the purpose, it was started asking how to do it. But to give an example where it could help: we have a type of catalog that has say 20 different categories with 250 different items. It was setup to have the blank rows in between, which makes it easier to visually scroll through. In that case, it'd be nice to filter and keep the natural segregation. The alternating row colors option wouldn't work well as filtering could combine similar colors afterward.

The one solution I can think of is having 1 column for each possible autofilter selection (say type a and b would use 2 columns). Then you would hide an A in the "blank" row in the A filter column, and a B in the B filter column. That way when you select A, the "blank" row automatically matches, and stays. This method works if you don't have a lot of items to categorize. But if you have 10 or so categories, it starts taking a lot of columns to do this. I really wouldn't consider this a good solution either, it's more of a band aid fix.