You do the right thing, Chris - for everybody who speaks up there are always dozens of people who are just too shy to mouth it
So this is how you deal with every filterable table on The Owl's Nest (Aircraft reference, MAIW list etc.).
Let's take Chris's example. You want to look for Hornets. Since you don't know if I have named them F-18 or F/A-18 in the list, and because you might also want to find any EA-18 Growler, the lowest common denominator is "-18" (without the quotation marks). So you enter "-18" in the empty field above aircraft and press Enter.
The list is reduced to 12 aircraft now. If you look at the right side of the list, you will see three columns
Model,
Paint and
F-Plan. In this example all 12 rows have a "
-" in the columns
Model and
F-Plan, and have an "
x" in the
Paint column.
"
-" stands for "
not available", "
x" represents "
available". So all 12 packages are only repaints without model or flight plan.
Press the "Remove filter" button on the top right of the table and you see all 368 entries again. You will note that the free text filter box exists only above the
Aircraft and the
Description column. The other columns have pre-defined dropdown filters.
Let's select "
x" in the
F-Plan column. The list is reduced to (now) 33 records. You see that all packages include paints as well (all have "
x" in the
Paint column. With the exception of three packages from Giorgio Perotti (which have "
-" in the
Model column) they also all includes the model.
The description filter helps e.g. to find common things. Press the "Remove filter" button on the top right to see all 368 entries again. Then type "155" in the description filter and press Enter. This results in two of Jason Rogers repaints of the Nebraska Air National Guard: Tankers and Phantoms.
Does this clarify the filter usage a bit?