sort

the default order is ascending, which for dates means oldest first — Excel sorts dates as the underlying serial numbers they actually are (each date is stored as a count of days since a fixed starting point), so "ascending" naturally means earliest date first, exactly like sorting ascending numbers means smallest first. Sorting the whole table (all rows) keeps each record together: Excel's Sort dialog, when started from inside a recognised data range with headers, sorts every column in lock-step by the same row reordering. Selecting one column alone and sorting only that column would scramble the data, because that column's values would be reordered while every other column's values stayed in their original row positions — each row would then mismatch its own date, venue, attendance and so on.

criteria on the same row are joined by AND; separate rows are OR — this is the single rule that makes or breaks every multi-condition Access query, and the one this particular question is built to test directly. The question needs Female AND (FinTech OR EdTech) AND after 2021: a condition with an AND/OR mix like this can't be expressed with only one row, since a single row only ever produces an AND of everything on it. If you split FinTech and EdTech over two rows you must repeat the other two criteria on both rows, otherwise the OR row would accept non-female or older start-ups — leaving gender or year blank on the second row doesn't mean "same as the row above," it means "no restriction at all" for that row, silently widening the results. "After 2021" is >2021, not >=, because "after" a year explicitly excludes that year itself — >=2021 would wrongly include start-ups founded in exactly 2021. Marks: gender criterion, sector OR, year criterion, sort, save — five separately checkable pieces of one query.