Excel has many powerful & time-saving features. Even by Excel’s standard, Flash Fill is magical. Introduced in 2013, Flash Fill is a rule engine to Excel’s fill logic. Every time you type something in a cell, Excel will try to guess the pattern and offers to fill up the rest of cells for you. That is some serious time saving magic.
Let’s understand what Flash Fill is and few sample use cases.
Flash Fill, a smart rule engine
Flash fill listens to your every key stroke and tries to guess what you are doing. Remember Clippy from Office 97? Think of Flash Fill as Clippy’s less annoying & invisible cousin. Once Flash Fill identifies a pattern in your data entry, it offers a way to type rest of the data for you. If you accept the suggestion, the rest of the cells are automatically filled up.
Flash fill may not be a convenient option for simple patterns (like 1,3,5… or a bunch of dates or month names). But once you go beyond the realm of simple patterns, Flash Fill can be very useful.
Especially, when it comes to cleaning data.
Example 1 – Extracting numbers from text
Let’s say you are looking at some text data and want to extract the number portion.
Now, there is no simple way to do this. Any formula or VBA approach can be tedious.
But see what happens when you unleash Flash Fill on this unruly data.
Example 2 – Extracting first name from list of names
Again, writing a formula can be tricky ( LEFT(name, FIND(" ",name)) should work – more here).
But Flash Fill is faster and simpler. Just type the first few names and let Flash Fill do its magic.
Example 3 – Writing a bunch of formulas
Humor me with a scenario where you have customer names and you must lookup some corresponding data. Obviously you plan to use VLOOKUP for this. But the lookup table has other plans. Instead of customer name, the lookup table has firstname-initial_of_lastname. So for Bill Gates, the lookup table lists the name as Bill-G.
Of course, you can write a complex VLOOKUP. But why bother? Use Flash Fill to do the dirty work for you.
See below illustration to understand how this works.
Once the lookups are written, you can use FIND REPLACE (Ctrl+H) to add = at the front.
Flash Fill tips & tricks:
- Press CTRL+E to trigger flash fill. Excel will look at previously typed data and guesses the rest.
- To ignore Flash Fill suggestion, press ESC.
- By default, Flash Fill will be always listening and offers suggestions whenever it can. If you want to disable this, Use File > Options > Advanced and uncheck “Automatically Flash Fill” option. Click here for a screenshot of this process.
Do you Flash Fill?
Flash Fill is a fun and powerful way to clean data and get what you want. I use it often, when dealing with complex datasets.
What about you? Do you Flash Fill? When do you use it? Please share your tips and use cases in the comments.
If you have never Flash Filled, go ahead and try it today. See the magic yourself and share your story in the comments.
Remember, your comments on this post qualify for $31 amazon gift card giveaway.
More fun & powerful ways to fill data:
If you like Flash Fill, check out below tutorials for more powerful ways to automate data entry & cleanup processes.
- Unleash pattern power fill Excel auto fill
- Quickly fill all blank cells in a table with data
- How to convert text to dates
This post is part of our Awesome August Excel Festival.
31 Responses to “Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you”
Would be considerably easier just to have a table with the variance shown.
On Step 3, how do you "Add budget and actual values to the chart again"?
There are a few ways to do it.
Easy:
1) Copy just the numbers from both columns (Select, CTRL+C)
2) Select the chart and hit CTRL+V to paste. This adds them to chart.
Traditional:
1) Right click on chart and go to "select data..."
2) From the dialog, click on "Add" button and add one series at a time.
One more way to accomplish it is just select the columns into chart. Press Ctrl+C and then press Ctrl+V
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me in Excel 2010. The "Var 1" and "Var 2" columns cannot combine two fonts to display the symbol and the figure side-by-side.
Secondly, there is no option to Click on “Value from cells” option when formatting the label options. The only options provided are Series Name, Category Name or Value.
@TheQ47... the emoji font also has normal English letters, so if you use that font, then you should be ok. I am assuming your computer doesn't have that font or hasn't been upgraded for emoji support.
Reg. Excel 2010, you can manually link each label to a cell value. Just select one label at a time (click on labels, wait a second, click on an individual label) and press = and link it to the label var 1 or var 2.
I am using excel 2010, please explain how to apply Step 12
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Neeraj,
"Value from cells" option is only available in Excel 2013 or above. In older versions, you have to manually adjust the label value by linking each label seperately.
Read this please: https://chandoo.org/wp/change-data-labels-in-charts/
Sir, you are just awesome.
Your creativity has no limit.
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Chandoo,
I just found your website, and really love it. It helps me a lot to be an Excel expert 😉
Currently I am facing with a problem at step 11:
Var1 Var2
D30%
A5%
B0%
B4%
B7%
C10%
C13%
D27%
I42%
Though at mapping table, I used windings, here formula uses calibra. How I can change it? I am able to change only the whole cell. In this case numbers will be Windings too.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mariann... Welcome to Chandoo.org and thanks for your comment.
If you wanted to use symbols from wingdings and combine them with % numbers, then you need to setup two labels. One with symbol, in wingdings font and another with value in normal font. Just add the same series again to the chart, make it invisible, add labels. You may need to adjust the alignment / position of label so everything is visible.
[…] firs article explains how you can enhance your charts with symbols. You can simply insert any supported symbol into your data and charts. To some extend you can […]
You're a good person, thank you to share your knowledge with us, I will try to do in my work
Great visualization of variance. My question is that is this possible in powerbi?
How would you go about it?
HELLO, WHY CANT I FIND VALUES FOR LABELS IN EXCEL 2013
Dear chanddo sir,
What to do if we have dynamic range for Chart. How this will work. can you able to make the same thing works on dynamic range.
Sir Chandoo,
Good Day!
First, I'd like to say that I am very grateful for your work and for sharing all these things with us.
I tried to do this chart but it seems that the symbols don't work with text (abs(var%),"0%") unless we keep the Windings font style.
The problem is, it converts the text into symbol as well and you wont see the 0% anymore. I'm using Windows 7.
WOW - Segoe UI Emoji
This is the greatest discovery for me this month 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Here's my two-cents:
https://wmfexcel.com/2019/02/17/a-compelling-chart-in-three-minutes/
Sir This is awesome chart, and very easy to made because of your way to explain is very simple , everyone can do. Thank you
one problem i am facing, I hv made this chart , but when i am inserting data table to chart it is showing two times , how can i resolve this
in this chart when i am adding new month data for example first i made this chart jan to mar but when i add data for the apr month graphs updated automatically but labels are missing for that new month
Hi Renuka,
Please make sure the formulas for labels are also calculated for extra months. Just drag down the series and set label range to appropriate address.
So I am playing with the Actual chart here - but amounts are bigger than your - you have 600 as Budget - my budget is 104,000 - is there a way to shorten that I am unaware of
thank you - I LOVE YOUR SITE
Thanks for the tips and tricks on Excel. In the Planned versus Actual chart examples, you use multiple values (ex. multiple Categories in above). How can this be done when we have only 1 set of values? For example if I have only this:
Planned Actual
SOW Budget 417480 367551
How can I create a single bar chart like the one above?
Thank you Chandoo.
This one is just perfect for my Quarterly Review presentation on Operational Budget against Actual Performance for the Hospital I'm currently working with.
Just Subscribed today (10 minutes ago)
Is there a way to make the table of data into a pivot table to be able to add a slicer for the graph due to many different categories and months?
Hi, I tried to modify you template with something appropriate for me, and I found a problem. this template was modified by me started with excel 2010, then 2016 and finally 2019. Same thing - somehow appear an error - or didn't show the emoticons for positive percentage or doubled the emoticons for some rows. I suspect to be from excel. if is need it I can sand you my xlsx for study. Please help if you can.
Hi Chandoo,
Could you please check the Var Formula in Step1. You have mentioned budget-actual and when i did this i got different values but when reversed like actual-budget i got the actual value what you have demonstrated in step1.
Please share your view.
This is a great chart (budget vs. actual). However, in trying recreate it, I cannot color in the UP Down bars individually, and they all become formatted with the same color. I'm using Office 365. Look forward to the feedback.
Thanks.
Dan
pls explain in detail step 7
While in the Excel sheet you have used following formula for Var
Var = Actual - Budget
But
in the note, you have written
Var = Budget - Actual
Good Presentation and Data information.thank you so much chandoo.