How to Build a Dynamic Excel Report with TAKE, FILTER, and SORT

Creating reports in Excel often means sorting, filtering, and copying data every week. But with modern Excel functions, you can automate most of that work.

In this post, I’ll show you how to build a fully automatic, real-world report using just three functions:

• FILTER – pulls the rows you want

• SORT – orders them by date

• TAKE – returns the latest top rows

• 
  

This combination creates a clean, dynamic report that updates itself whenever new data is added.

The Scenario: Latest High-Value Orders by Region

Let’s pretend you work for a company that tracks product orders across different regions. Your manager asks for a report that always shows:

• the newest orders,

• from a selected region,

• sorted by order date,

• and limited to the latest 5 records.

Instead of rebuilding this report every week, we’ll automate the entire thing.

Step 1: Filter the Data

First, filter by region and minimum order amount:

=FILTER(A2:F100, C2:C100="South")

This instantly pulls only the rows you need.

Step 2: Sort by the Most Recent Order Date

Next, sort the filtered results:

=FILTER(
	SORT(A2:F100, 2,1)
, C2:C100="South")

“2” refers to the OrderDate column, and “1” sorts oldest → newest.

Step 3: Take the Newest 20 Rows

Finally, use TAKE to return the top N rows (N stored in cell H4):

=TAKE(
	FILTER(
		SORT(A2:F100, 2,1)
	, C2:C100="South")
,-5)

Now your report updates automatically anytime the dataset grows.

EXERCISE FILE:

ExcelTakeFunction-02.xlsx

Download XLSX • 15KB