What is a filter in Access?

A filter reduces down the amount of records you see by applying some condition. So if you had a list of people but you only wanted to list the women or people over a certain age or people who earned above a certain salary or were living in a certain town, you could apply a filter. You would then only see the records that meet that condition. The other records would not be deleted and if you remove the filter, they will appear again. There are different ways of applying filters and they can be simple or complicated, like when you have a combination of conditions.