What is an Access document? Cover sheet?
It's generally accepted that you should NOT be opening your tables and directly editing them. You should be presenting the records in a form view and applying the filter at that time. That filter can be a query or code, either of which can use hard-coded criteria to filter the results, or get values from a form. Or the form's record source should exclude all records marked as complete, thus no filter is required at all. Filters are generally used to trim record sets that have already been defined but where you want a subset of those records based on some fluent situation. Perhaps I misunderstood your post...
The more we hear silence, the more we begin to think about our value in this universe.
Paraphrase of Professor Brian Cox.