Designing your own Microsoft Project F​ilter

Test describes a condition that must be met such as ‘greater than’ or ‘does not equal’ whereas Value(s) is a value that you enter and can be a date or a cost for example, but you could enter a predetermined value instead, such as a baseline cost for example.

As an example of a custom filter, you could filter out any task that is above 50% complete AND whose actual cost is still below (less than) the planned baseline cost (you could have just used one row to define your filter if required)

In addition, you could check the Show related summary rows, so that the filter ALSO shows any summary bars that the filtered task relates to. In addition, you could ask this new filter name to be added to the choices of the original filter list by checking the Show in menu box.

Click on the [No Filter] menu selection to return to your full non-filtered view.
Don’t forget to Save your file before closing it if you want to retain your new filter for future use.

Interactive Filters

These types of filters ask for specific information to be entered in dialog boxes as part of their application (rather than just applying the criteria without any human interaction).
An example of an existing Interactive filter is the Date Range… filter
On the left, one of the two dialog boxes than appear when you select that filter. On the right you can see the criteria for that filter.

Note the Value(s) field. To make a filter interactive, but appropriate text within quotation marks.

When applying it, two dialog boxes appear, one for Free Slack and the second for Total Slack (Free and Total Slack are often the same numerically, but they can differ), and you could include a test NOT to show any critical tasks (since their free and total slack will be zero by definition).

Auto Filters and Highlight Filters

The Auto Filter is turned on by default for all new schedule files. To select or de-select the Auto Filter function, go to File, View, Data, and select the Filter pull-down menu.
Above left you could select the pre-designed filters, or ​any filter that you have already created.

The lower red arrow shows where to click to select or deselect the Auto Filter function, and there is a useful filter for only showing tasks with a selected resource name (above, bottom-right).

For now, select the Display Auto Filter command, which will show a small pull down arrow in the header field of each row (above, top-right).

Selecting the Auto Filter from the Work Table, you can select all or one of the criteria to
change. To select that option, click on the OK button:

A Highlight filter works to meet your selection criteria by rather than remove non-matching filter items from view, it keeps all items in view but simply highlights each item that meet your criteria.

In a similar way to the AutoFilter, using a Highlight Filter can be select from File, View, Data, and click on the pull down menu for the Highlight: field.

Again, a pre-designed filter could be selected as before, as well as options for created a new customer Highlight Filter,
Clearing existing selected filters, or to view the dialog box to create your own custom Highlight Filter.
As an example of a pre-designed Highlight Filter, you could create a Milestone Filter.