How to Add a Control that Queries Multiple Fields

[jobC]

I'm building my first report with LookerStudio and running into difficulty. 

Report contains a list of apps used by my school. I have a column that lists which grade levels have access to the app, all within a single field. 

I'd like to be able to sort/filter the app list by which grades can use it, but none of the controls are working well. Ideally I would have a drop-down list where teachers can select 1 or more grade levels to sort the list. How can I achieve this? I'm open to creating separate columns for each grade level if I need to, but was unable to figure out how to create a single control box that referenced 13 different fields. 

[lauratilton · Accepted solution]

One idea would be to use an Input Box control instead of a drop-down to filter your data. This may not do everything you need, but it will allow you to search the field that contains the grade levels. Here's an example of a dashboard that uses this approach. It uses an Input Box control with a Search Type of "Contains." The field used is a field called "Grade Levels" that contains values like "2, 3, 4, 5" or "8, 9" (which may be similar to yours?) We used this field with the Input Box control in this example, but then changed the display name so it was "Enter a Grade Level and hit Return."  

The caveat with this one is that it is searching on a specific substring. So if you searched "2, 4" it would not find records where the Grade Level is "2, 3, 4" but it would come up if you searched "2" or "4" or "2, 3" etc.

If you really wanted to set up separate fields (Yes/No) for each grade level, you could, but I think you'd have to use 13 separate Yes/No selectors. Unfortunately parameters (which initially I thought could help here) are only single-select.