Create hierarchical views of your data which users can collapse and expand; sort data by clicking column headers or filter data out of view. The simple, yet powerful grouping, sorting and filtering mechanisms are offered by the ICollectionView data source. With FlexGrid, filtering and grouping even work perfect together with large data sets.

By just setting one property, ShowOutlineBar, you can display numbered buttons that expand and collapse each level of the outline tree.

Just like the WinForms version, FlexGrid enables cell merging at the grid level. Just set the AllowMerging property on specific rows and columns to enable this feature where you need it. Cell merging will merge adjacent cells that have the same content, while positioning the text so that it is always most readable to the user. C1FlexGrid also supports custom cell merging which can be used to achieve any merging scenario imaginable.

FlexGrid includes an extension assembly which adds Excel-like filtering support. Users may set the filter by selecting values that should be displayed or by specifying conditions that must be met by the values in the column.

FlexGrid supports multiple fixed rows for column headers and multiple fixed columns for row headers. This concept allows you to create "bands" or multi-cell headers useful for organizing columns into groups. Cell merging is used to achieve this functionality.

FlexGrid has a rich selection model which includes the following selection modes: single cell, cell range, single row, row range, and list box. ListBox selection refers to an arbitrary set of non-continuous rows. You can extract a lot of useful information from the Selection including a collection of data items, or just the string values. You can easily monitor selections in the SelectionChanged event.

FlexGrid provides an easy way to apply simple formatting to a specific grid row or column. For example, you might want to highlight a column by applying a bold font and yellow background to it. This is possible because the row and column objects expose a complete collection of style properties for customizing the fonts and brushes used to render the grid. You can set these style properties in XAML or in code.

The C1FlexGrid control has AutoSizeRow and AutoSizeColumn methods that take into account the data currently visible. This can be done quickly and accurately.

The C1FlexGrid control for Silverlight shares a similar object model to the classic WinForms version. This includes how the control indexes rows and columns.