Sort and filter data
We analyze data to answer a business question or find a story within the data. Sorting and filtering data helps us achieve this goal. For example, how many sales were made in the New York store on Monday? Or how many packages were shipped from the warehouse on Friday?
Filtering excludes rows from the result set that don't answer the question we're asking. If we filter out all stores except New York, we can then analyze the results from a smaller dataset and count how many sales were made. We can filter on any column in a dataset, regardless of the type of data within that column.
By sorting the dataset, we can find the highest or lowest value within a column. Sorting can be performed on any data type, but is often performed on a date or number type, to answer a question such as the highest number of sales. String data can be sorted alphabetically in ascending or descending order.
Outliers are values that are unusually high or low compared to the other values in the dataset. When an outlier is included in an aggregate function, such as an average, it can create misleading results.
In this video, you'll see how a dataset can be filtered to answer a question, and how columns can be sorted to discover the highest and lowest values within a range: