When you are a “work from home” dad, you can see a lot of patterns. Here is one.
My kids come home from school by noon (they are too young for full day school). Right after lunch they watch their favorite cartoon program, Team Umizoomi, in which few fictional characters go about solving problems in the Umi city using maths. Milli, one of the characters is an expert with patterns. She solves problems by identifying patterns and unleashing pattern power.
Here is a fun example of the pattern power. (It has Chef Gordan Ramsey too, which is sweet)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JTxJiCQEMc
Team Umizoomi & Excel Fill – How do they link up?
Here is how they link up.
Imagine you have a workbook where you need to follow a pattern, like one of these:
You too can unleash the pattern power. What more… you needn’t break in to a song sequence every-time you unleash the power.
How to use Excel’s pattern fill?
Here is an example. Let’s say you want 2 different formulas & 1 blank cells in a sequence.
- Write the first formula in cell 1
- Second formula in cell 2
- Leave the 3rd cell blank
- Select all 3 cells
- Drag to fill
See the screencast aside to understand this concept.
Bonus tip: You can use this technique horizontally too.
Where to use this pattern power?
Here are few uses for pattern fills:
- Dashboards & reports where you need to show some information but space it with blanks for readability
- Apply different formatting to different rows / columns
- Set conditional formatting only to every nth cell
- Format (or write formulas for) weekdays & weekends differently
I use pattern power often when designing dashboards or complex reports.
What about you?
Do you use pattern power? Tell us in the comments where you would use them.
I must go now, I hear the umi alarm. Looks like the kids are back from school.
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.