Exploring List View Features

Searching and Filtering List Views

There are two ways to search a list. You can use the Find Panel or the Auto Filter Row.

The Find Panel searches every column looking for matches and reduces the list to only those rows that contain the text you have specified. The Auto Filter Row works a bit differently. As you can see in the screenshot above, the Auto Filter Row provides an open field below each column heading. If you type some text below the Full Name heading, for example, the list will be filtered down to just those rows where the Full Name contains the text that you have entered. In addition, text fields (as opposed to numeric or date fields) by default contain a little ABC icon. Click that icon to specify the filter option you want to use. The default setting is to match data that contains the text you type, but there are many other options including “is equal” (exact match), “begins with”, “ends with”, and even negative conditions such as “does not contain”:

There is a similar feature for number and date fields. Clicking the default “=” icon provides options including “does not equal”, “is greater than”, “is less than” and more. Date fields also include an icon on the right end of the field that you can click to display a date picker pop-up that you may prefer to typing a date.

If you do not see the Search feature you would like to use, right-click any column heading and select the feature (“Show Find Panel” or “Show Auto Filter Row”) on the pop-up menu. To do your search, enter text into either the Find Panel or the Auto Filter Row, or both. You can even put search text under more than one column. As you add or change search conditions, the list will shrink to show only those rows that match ALL the criteria you have specified. The video below demonstrates the features:

G5 list views provide other options to create even more powerful filters. When you move the mouse over a column heading, you will see a tiny funnel icon appear to the right of the heading text. Click that icon to display a filter creation tool that is appropriate to that column. For example, if you were to click that icon on the Primary Provider heading, you would reveal a window containing a checklist of all the providers found in the list. If we wanted to filter the list down to just patients with primary providers “AA”, “KP”, and “SK” all we need do is to check the desired provider codes:

Doing so creates a more complex filter condition that reduces the patient list to only those who have a primary provider that we checked. Note that as you create filters using either the Auto Filter Row, or the funnel in the column headings, the system generates a more formal filter expression that displays at the bottom of the list. We can add more conditions by using the funnel or Auto Filter Row on other columns. Here is the result if we use the Auto Filter Row to add the condition that the patient birth date must be on or after January 1, 1970. Note the new condition that appears in the filter expression along with our original primary provider specification:

Once a filter has been specified, you can view or even construct much more elaborate filters using the built-in filter editor. To launch the editor, click “Edit Filter” at the right end of the line showing the filter expression, or right-click any column heading and select Filter Editor. Use of the Filter Editor is an advanced topic. You can find more information about the Filter Editor here.

Moving columns

To move a column to a different position, simply click and drag. See the video below:

Resize Columns

As with many other software products, to resize a column, click the left or right edge of the column heading and drag it to the desired position.

Hiding Columns

To hide a column, right-click the column heading and select Hide This Column from the pop-up menu.

Displaying Hidden Columns and Adding New Columns

To restore a previously hidden column, or to add a new column, right-click any of the column headings and select Column Chooser from the pop-up. A small grid will appear, displaying columns that are available to display on the current list. Click and drag the new column to the desired location among the column headings. Two arrows will appear, indicating the target placement. When the arrows show the desired position, drop the column by releasing the mouse button. When you are finished adding columns, close the Column Chooser window by clicking the X in its upper right corner. See the video below:

Sorting List by Column Value

Just as in Windows’ File Explorer, click the desired column heading to sort the list by the values in that column. Clicking again, will reverse the sort order.

Grouping

To group the items in a list by the value in a particular column, either:

• Right-click the desired column and select Group By This Column from the pop-up menu, or…
• Drag columns into the Group By Box just above the column headings. If you don’t see a Group By Box, then right-click any column heading and select Show Group By Box.

With either technique, you can add sub-grouping by repeating the process with additional columns. You can either drag or click interchangeably. For example, instead of dragging, you can select Group By This Column on the pop-up menu, and your selected column will appear in the Group By Box. You can then drag another column into the box and the second column will be shown as a subgroup under the first. To quickly cancel grouping, right-click the Group By Box and select Clear Grouping from the pop-up menu.

Group Summaries

Once you have grouped your list, you can easily add summaries to the group headings. Here is an example in which we have grouped our patients by primary provider and have added summaries that show the count of patients in each group, as well as the most recent intake (maximum intake date) for each provider:

In order to display group summaries, right-click the summary column heading in the Group By Box and select Group Summary Editor from the pop-up menu. To get the results above, we used the following configuration:

That is, after showing the editor, we checked the Count option at the top, selected the Intake Date field, and checked the Max summary type. Because Intake Date is a date type of data, the Average and Sum types of summaries are not available, but if we had selected a regular numeric field, we could have easily selected either of those. In addition, if you would like to select more than one of the available summaries, you can do that. If we wanted to, we could have selected Min as well as Max to show the earliest as well as the most recent intake in each provider group.

The other tab of the Group Summary Editor window allows us to change the order in which the summaries are displayed. The order we have shown in our example above is Count followed by Max Intake Date, but we could have easily reversed them using the Order tab of this editor.

see also:
How to Print Reports and Query Your Data Using List Views