Advance Spreadsheet Skills

LESSON: USING FLASH FILL

LEVEL: BEGINNER

CONTENTS:
5 Using Flash Fill
 Flash fill is a feature new to Excel 2013.
It lets you enter and manipulate data… in a flash!
This presentation shows how to use flash fill to
extract, combine and manipulate existing
data.
 By the end of this presentation you can:
 Quickly extract parts of existing values into other cells

 Easily combine and manipulate existing data using flash fill

 Use flash fill with the keyboard, ribbon or Excel’s suggestions.

Flash fill uses pattern recognition to anticipate the data you’re
entering and allows you to do this with just a few keystrokes.
Let’s start with a file we’ve imported into Excel which has the full
names of 16 company employees.
What if we want to extract just the first names of these
employees?
 We start by typing the first value we want.
Flash fill uses this to check the entry against existing data.
As we continue typing, flash fill recognises the pattern and
suggests a completion for this and all the other cells.
Press Enter to accept the flash fill recommendation.
To ignore flash fill, just press Escape.
You can also flash fill by selecting the next cell down then pressing
CTRL + E, or use the Editing group.
Flash fill can also extract values from the middle or end of text
strings.
And it can recognise text stings split up by hyphens, commas and
other symbols as well.
Flash fill can also be used to combine separate cells together:
And it recognises when you’re changing the case of existing data:
You can use flash fill to add text to existing values:
… or extract different parts of numerical values.
Flash fill can integrate a number of these patterns at once.
In this case, we’re converting the first name to an initial, using
other values and inserting other text (all at once!).
If you delete or change the existing data, the flash filled entries
will not update or be affected.
When using flash fill, it’s important to have consistently formatted
data – if not, the results can be missing or wrong.