I’ve been giving the Excel Index that I developed last year a lot of use – mainly for the Memento Management  activity – and I’ve decided that having just one column for Facet is not enough. Inevitably there are cases where you want to specify two facets (for example, Loughborough and Rugby) and this is easily done by just putting one after the other with a comma between in the single Excel cell. The trouble is that Excel’s filter facility lists things alphabetically so, in the example above, if you look for Loughborough the entry “Loughborough, Rugby” appears in the appropriate position. However, if you are looking up “Rugby” the “Loughborough, Rugby” entry does not appear in that position so you may miss that particular item related to Rugby.

I’ve addressed the problem by including a second column for Facet, and by including both entries in both columns but with one in reverse order to the other, for example, in Column 1 “Loughborough, Rugby” and in column 2 “Rugby, Loughborough”. This ensures that, provided a search is done in both columns for a particular facet, you will find every instance of that facet and all secondary facets used with the facet being searched for.