Earlier this week a customer asked me how she could filter a list based on strikethrough. She had a multi-column list similar to the following:

The file was opened several times a day by different people who reviewed each entry and if appropriate, marked it for deletion. Once a week the marked items were reviewed before being deleted or the mark removed.

The way that they marked an item for deletion was to use the strikethrough option in the font dialog box.

Which produced this:

I couldn’t find a simple solution (well one that didn’t involve VBA code, which I didn’t have time to write) to her problem. My quick and dirty solution was to add another column “ToDelete”, type “Yes” for the items to be deleted and filter on that instead but she didn’t like that suggestion.

So we compromised on a solution – forget the strikethrough option, change the colour of the text to red for items to be deleted and filter by colour. In the screenshot below, 2 entries have been marked for deletion. As it happens, they are both UK entries but it could have been any country/countries.

To apply the filter, select a single cell in the range, click on the Data tab on The Ribbon and click the Filter button. This adds a filter arrow to each heading cell in row 1. Click the filter arrow for Country.

Select Filter by Color and select red (it’s the only colour listed because it’s the only font colour used in that column (apart from the default). In this case she only wanted to look at UK items marked for deletion so uncheck all the checkboxes except UK

Click OK and this is the result: