BillTrack50 Help Center

In this blog we will go into detail on how you can filter your bill sheet grid to help you find the specific information that you want to see. If you would prefer to watch a video on how to filter your bill sheet instead, then look no further than this video.

Step 1. Hover over the label at the top of the column on your bill sheet with your mouse and an icon should appear that looks like 3 lines. Clicking on the 3 lines will open a menu open that has options for filtering your bill sheet. If your are on your tablet or phone then tap and hold on the label to get the menu to appear (just tapping will sort on that column, but a long tap will bring up the menu).

Note: In this example, we will mainly be filtering by state, but you can filter by any of the columns. Each of the filters will have options appropriate for the kind of data in the associated column, like “more than” and “equal to” for numbers, a calendar interface for dates, and so on, all of this will be covered in detail below!

Step 2. The next step is to select how you want to filter your sheet. Most of the filters start with a drop down list to choose how your bill sheet will filtered, often followed by a text box where you will enter your filter criteria, such as a state abbreviation. Once you filter on a column the label will be bold, to remind you that you have a filter applied. If you wish to remove the filter, open the filter again and click the “Reset Filter” button at the bottom.

It should also be noted that most of the filters allow you to enter more than one criteria; when combining multiple criteria you can pick if a bill must meet the requirement of both filters or to only require a bill to fulfill one OR the other filter. You can also filter by more than one column at once. When setting up multiple columns all column criteria must apply, for example if you choose to filter state on equal to CA and filter last action date on > ‘7/1/2021’ you will only get bills that are both in California AND have had an action since July 1.

For Text Columns, you are given the following options to sort by.

1. Contains: For a Bill to show up in your list the text in the column must include whatever you put down in the second box. For example, if you filter by bill number and put “SB” in the text box, only bills with SB in the bill number will show up.
2. Not Contains: The opposite of contains, if a bill in the filtered section contains what you typed in the second box, those bills will be filtered out and hidden from you. For example, if you wrote in “CO” and are filtering by states, then all bills from Colorado would not be shown to you if you set it to “Not Contains”.
3. Equals: Unlike Contains, with this option you only get an exact match. For example, if you have the exact name or number of the bill, you can use equals to quickly find what you are looking for.
4. Not Equals: The inverse of Equals, this option lets you remove certain bills. For example, if you don’t want to see federal bills, you can put choose Not Equals and enter US into the text box, which will hide all federal bills.
5. Starts With: This option allows you to put in a few letters (or numbers) into the second box and then pull up anything in the filtered section that starts with those letters. For example, if you want to see all the House bills, you can filter Bill Number by this section and put “H” into the second box, which will result in you only seeing bills that start with H, which are usually house bills. But be careful! Some states use other letters for their bills such as, “A” for Assembly.
6. Ends With: Similar to Starts With, this options let you filter by the final characters of whatever you are filtering. So for example if you filter by “50”, in the Bill Number section, you will find only bills that end with “50”.

Number columns have >, <, =, <> options as do Date columns. I will cover the options that Action Date has specific to it below. Note that all dates from this column are of the most recent action, and not necessarily when the bill was first written.

1. Equals: The equals for Action Date, works a bit differently than for other columns. You pick a date and then it will filter the sheet to show you only bills whose last action is from that date. As an example, if you pick the date 12/1/2017, you will only be shown bills from your list that are from that date.
2. Greater Than: Will Show you bills that have an action that took place AFTER the chosen date. For example, if you pick the date 9/5/2019 you would only see bills after that date.
3. Less Than: Will show you bills that have an action that took place BEFORE the chosen date. For example, if you pick 10/12/2020 you would see only bills from before that date.
4. Not Equal: The opposite of Equals, instead of showing you all the bills from the specific chosen date, it instead shows you all bills NOT from that chosen date. For example, if you picked 5/2/2016, all bills from that date would be hidden and not show up, every other bill on the list would show up.
5. In Range (date columns only): This option lets you pick two dates, then pulls up all bills from that date range. For example, if you picked 4/1/2020 – 7/14/2021 you would see all bills from that time period, but none before or after.

If you have a drop down list in your bill sheet, like position, that filter will look quite different, simply letting you pick which options you want to include, and giving you the option to include or exclude blank columns.