Hi, Diane. AT2 has a little gear icon in the top left which let's you restrict what columns you display, but it doesn't make the corresponding rows disappear for hidden columns. @francisvachon made the same observation/request recently over in [this thread](https://www.aeontimeline.com/forum/channel/#!/support/user-interface:group-by-filter). We came to the conclusion that the missing feature is a button to optionally toggle display of entities that are empty (ie don't have any events which match the current filter). I think the best you can hope for right now is to "group by" something other than the people/participant entities. You might want to create a custom entity type which you use for specific groups or views that may or may not have much to do with your actual story/data. You could use these groups to force events together for specific views. This other entity type could be as simple as a single entity named "Principals" which you assign to your five major characters. That would at least make them bubble to the top in your views. Perhaps someone has a more elegant solution?
Hmmm. Well, that makes the tool pretty useless for me. And hiding blank rows won't work, because I have big events that involve just about everyone. So even if I filter to only events where my main characters are involved, and hide blank lines, that won't hide much. What I really need is a filter on people, rather than just a filter on events. I'll keep my ear to the ground, but I think I'm going back to AT1, and hope it keeps working with whatever operating system upgrades Apple forces on me.
If the page hid not just events, but also the rows for everyone who didn't match the filter, isn't that what you want? I just called them "empty" because the way they show up now, you have many empty rows where all of the content is blocked by the filter.