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.
23 Responses to “Learn Top 10 Excel Features”
What it looks like if excel without formula?? 🙂
It would be not excel it would just be fancy tables in which you could just use power point. (Chandoo) would Access be an alternative?
Awesome piece of work!!!
Great article.
Chandoo - my biggest interest in the article was the awesome word-graphic at the top - where did you go to get it done into a shape?
@Rich.. thank you. I used http://www.tagxedo.com/ to generate this word cloud. I took all the comments in the original post, pasted them in tagxedo website and set up the shape etc.
Awesome Chandoo.. You need always needs coffee to start up with. BTW , how did u created the Heart Shaped picture filled with High Repetitive text in it .. Please put it on your Next blog ...
Chandoo, good article. I’ve added a link to it from Connexion – our collection of the most useful and interesting spreadsheet-related articles from the web. See http://www.i-nth.com/resources/connexion
Hi,
Just one small question. Where the hell have been I in the past for not discovering this website sooner?
I've lost a job interview recently where even though I had the subject knowledge, I was not upto their mark in Excel.
Thank you for all the free tips, guidance and for creating this forum environment.
[PS: I've just been through the site for the 1st time, and have signed up for the newsletter. You can expect pretty stupid questions from me soon]
Hy Chandoo, you always inspire me with to explore something new in excel. This data structure table is only for excel 2007 or compatible to 2010. I recently installed latest excel version 2013 in my System and experience problems regarding operating according to previous one. I'm waiting your article relates to that excel version.
Thanks
Awesome article Mr. Chandoo and that is a awesome heart shaped pic you created. Great tips as well.
[...] Learn Top 10 Excel Features | Chandoo.org – Learn Microsoft Excel Online. [...]
Chandoo is awesome..
Thanks, i got better, And i always get 90.50 in my grade card but now i get 96.50 i improved because of the tutorials you gave, Thank You Very Much Chandoo Guy.
Hi chandoo, i am intersted in seeing the video or step by step done procedure of analysing the comments and presenting in the data percentage steps. I think this one would be first step in finding out how generally happens data calculation. Thank you.
As well i would like to know how to get that black shape art of your face which i see in chandoo. I am interested in making it for me.
Nice to see the features considered by Excel users to be most useful. It might be a good idea to also analyze StackOverflow Excel questions to see what keywords appear most often.
Here are my top 10 Excel Features (for advanced users):
http://www.analystcave.com/excel-10-top-excel-features/
Thanks a ton for this it totally helped with my homework ????
Very good effort
Thank you for this. Lots of learning in the links you've provided for this septuagenarian.
Pls send me new post
Dude, your humor ? ?
Loved your work.
Hello Sir,
I am Sanjeev Khakre and i from Indore City, India , I am your big follower and i have watch your videos and learnt a lots of excel trick or function and many more . thanks so much for all of your excellent support.
Your excel knowledge is real awesome.
Thanks
Sanjeev
Your work is excellent but pls willing to know more details about the features of microsoft excel
Chandoo Would Access be a better alternative than VB?