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.
17 Responses to “Budget vs. Actual Profit Loss Report using Pivot Tables”
Good Work, Yogesh & Chandoo! Thanks.
Hi everybody,
first sorry I am late to say something about this topic;actually I was waiting last part
second I am not accountant I am an Engineer
third """"Very Important""" the idea is not about Loss but I am sure it is profit
Based on third it shows:
1- How to use EXCEL
2- How to use pivot TABLES
3- How to collect and arrange DATA
4- How to make reports
Many Thanks
Hi Yogesh and Chandoo,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
You guys are great!
thanks chandoo and yogesh, thanks for you lessons, are great!....i have a idea for a budget. I try to do it..... thanks for all
Thanks a lot for sharing the most powerful tool worldwide "knowledge"
Warm greetings from Peru
Hi -
This is a really great article because it's a simple and common thing you'd want to do with a pivot table but not at all obvious how to do it! So - muchas gracias to Chandoo and Yogesh!
One thing - I couldn't get past the group error in the sample file. I would click on ungroup but it didn't seem to have any effect. I'd appreciate it if anybody has any pointers here.
-Juanito
Hi Chandoo
I am also having the group error. Can't seem to ungroup? Appreciate if you explain further on the steps required in order to get to calculated items.
Many thanks and keep up the great work.
Cheers
Adam
Hi Chandoo,
I'm struggling resolving the problem depicted below:
I have a set of data, with (among others) a "Region" field (can be APJ, EMEA, or AMS), and a "Country" field.
Unfortunately, I need to group data by the following 4 Regions: APeJ, Japan, EMEA and AMS.
I first tried to make a pivot with Region and Country in the rows (or columns), and then group Country data as per the above.
Alas, as soon as I have a new Country that appear in my data set, my groupings are broken, and I have to redo the job of ungrouping, grouping etc.
I thought I could try to use calculated item, by adding first a new column to my dataset concatenating Region_Country, and create an "APeJ" calculated item that would sum all the "APJ_*" and substract the "APJ_Japan", but again, no clue, as I can't find a way to use any wild card in those formulas.
Given that I already found extremely helpful tips and tricks in your site that helped me manage that bunch of data, I'm pretty sure you'll have a bright idea on how I can solve that one!
Thanks in advance for your lights!
Hi Catherine...
In such cases, I advice using an additional column in the data itself. You can set-up a grouping table else where with country in first column, region in second column. And then in the data, you can add an extra column and use VLOOKUP to fetch the region based on the country.
Then feed this entire data (with extra column) to pivot table and use the extra column to group the data.
Hi Chandoo,
Thank you for your prompt answer.
I finally came to the same conclusion - after a rest 🙂 . I was probably too tired Friday evening (it was rather late), having spent hours in manipulating all my surveys data so as to pull rolling averages, make nice graphs and so on, and was trying to find a complex solution when there was a simple one.
Thanks again,
Catherine
Hey,
Great post!
I for example have different database structure with the following fields :
Date, Expense, Income, Sum (Income - Expense), Category (Sales, Cost of Goods and etc).
Creating a P&L report for the whole year works great. Including gross margin % and etc.
Though, creating P&L report by QTR/Month is becoming impossible since i get the following error : “This PivotTable report field is grouped. You cannot add calculated item to grouped filed.”
Is there a solution for this kind of problem?
Like Adam and Juanito, I also cannot ungroup.
Would appreciate it if you can add a few more lines and a screenshot or two on where to put the mouse cursor to ungroup.
Hi, I have figured out the ungrouping problem. One of the earlier steps was to group by month, if you pull the month back down to the column then right click and then select ungroup, then pull the month back up so you end up with just data source and budget/actual as the headings, then you can continue on.
To solve the ungroup problem, my method is:
Copy the "data" sheet to a whole new Excel workbook
and directly work on Part 6.
And since it is a fresh copy, Excel don't show me the "can't ungroup" problem. Hope this help.
Thank you Yogesh for this wonderful tutorial.
Kent, Malaysia
Just when i thought pivots were awesome i learn about inserting the calculated fields and that makes them more awesome. chandoo where have you been all my life.
Hello - your P&L pivot version has really impressed my boss and would like to use it. I have applied it for a actual vs budget vs forecast model I have created. One problem. In your variance above the operating profit percent % variance shows 33.8% but I want it to show (0.01) point or the true diff from prior budget.
I know I can add calculation to the side but boss would like to see it in pivot table.
Please help
Thanks
I have a further query which may solve my above dilemma. Is it possible to add a column that calculates percent increase. So in the example above a new column would be added to show variance %.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks