[Google Sheets] Filter Multiple Conditions

In my Etsy adventures I've collected a huge list of keywords (12,000+!) I use a combination of Marmalead and Etsy Rank for my keyword research and use Google Sheets to organize them.

The Problem

In this keyword acquisition exercise, I ended up with a ton of keywords that were generally relevant, but didn't quite describe my particular product. So I've been looking for ways to isolate only the keywords that are relevant to the products that I offer right now, without losing keywords that may be relevant later. My thought was to use the Google Sheets "filter."

tackling multiple conditions

I quickly found that within the GUI of Google Sheets, it wasn't an option to filter by multiple conditions; phrases that contain only certain words. Basically a series of OR logic statements/conditions.

use pseudo code to plan (I'm old)

I'm from the old school and I almost always need to write pseudo code to visualize and plan how I'm going to approach a problem. It looked something this like this:

In column A, only show results that contain the words, "perler, nintendo, gift, geek, or nerd"

'REGEXmatch' formula

Now that I know what I'm doing, I found that I can use a regular expression in the filter custom formula input to tell Google Sheets to filter the results using the required multiple conditions.

There is plenty of literature about regex within the Google Sheets documentation if you're curious about why this works. The important thing to pay attention to are the terms separated by the "|" (pipe) characters. This is where you will enter your list of terms to filter by.

Save as Filter View

Make sure to save this filter view so that you can toggle these conditions easily!

Filtered view mode has these grey borders.

Save as Filter View