Why this matters
A list of 2,000 loan repayments is useless until you can find the late ones. And a beneficiary register is only as good as what people typed into it. Sorting and filtering help you find what matters; data validation stops bad data at the door. MIS and data officer adverts often ask for data quality and validation skills, because cleaning mistakes later costs far more time than preventing them.
Sorting
Sorting reorders rows by one or more columns. Click a cell in your table, then use Sort on the Data tab (or the filter button in a header) and choose A to Z, Z to A, smallest to largest or largest to smallest.
You can sort by more than one level. For example, sort by Branch A to Z, then by Amount largest to smallest, to see each branch's biggest sales at the top of its group. In Excel use Custom Sort and add a level; in Google Sheets use Data, then Sort range with advanced options.
Always sort the whole table, not a single column, or the rows get scrambled. Using an Excel table avoids this, because sorting a table moves complete rows.
Filtering
Filtering hides the rows you do not want to see without deleting them. Click the filter button on a header and tick the values to keep, or use number filters such as "greater than 1000" and date filters such as "this month". Filters on several columns combine: Branch is Wa and Status is Late. When you are done, clear the filter so nobody thinks rows are missing.