Excel Made Easy

Flash fill in excel in Excel

Flash fill is another useful feature of excel that makes a lot of work easier.

The Flash fill is similar to dragging a formula or sequence down the column except that, it has a small difference which is as explained below.

Generally, Dragging a Cell down the column either drags the formula or in case of numbers, it fills the numbers in sequence.

But what if one want to drag a pattern which might not be a formula?

This is achieved with the help of Flash Fill.

The following example illustrates this.

From the above example, the columns are read as follows:

Name

Country

Email

Here, The name and country are filled, but the email Id is filled for first record only.

Notice that, the email id is plain text and does not contains any concatenation formula which can be easily dragged down.

To make sure, just select the Cell C9, it will show the value and not any formula.

The pattern is simple, its Column1.Column2@gmail . Com.

Now Select Cell C9

Goto Data tab and select "Flash Fill"

The remaining columns will be filled as shown below:

Note that, the excel can predict the pattern and fill accordingly and that's the wonder of Flash Fill.

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