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COMPUTER SOFTWARE APPLICATION - CITS

Flash Fill option

Using Flash Fill in Excel
Flash Fill automatically fills your data when it senses a pattern. For example, you can use Flash Fill to separate
first and last names from a single column, or combine first and last names from two different columns.

Note: Flash Fill is only available in Excel 2013 and later.
How to use Flash Fill in Excel

Flash Fill is one of the most amazing features of Excel. It grabs a tedious task that would take hours to be
performed manually and executes it automatically in a flash (hence the name). And it does so quickly and simply
without you having to do a thing, but only provide an example of what you want.
What is Flash Fill in Excel?
Excel Flash Fill is a special tool that analyses the information you are entering and automatically fills data when
it identifies a pattern.
The Flash Fill feature was introduced in Excel 2013 and is available in all later versions of Excel 2016, Excel 2019,
Excel 2021, and Excel for Microsoft 365.
History

Started in December 2009 as an attempt of Sumit Gulwani, a senior researcher at Microsoft, to help a
businesswoman he accidentally met at the airport with her merging challenge, a few years later it has evolved
into a powerful ability to automate many Excel chores.
Flash Fill easily copes with dozens of different tasks that otherwise would require complex formulas or even VBA
code such as splitting and combining text strings, cleaning data and correcting inconsistencies, formatting text
and numbers, converting dates to the desired format, and a lot more.
Each time, Flash Fill combines millions of small programs that might accomplish the task, then sorts those
code snippets using machine-learning techniques and finds the one that suits best for the job. All this is done in
milliseconds in the background, and the user sees the results almost immediately!
Where is Flash Fill in Excel?

In Excel 2013 and later, the Flash Fill tool resides on the Data tab, in the Data tools group:

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CITS : IT&ITES - Computer Software Application - Lesson 63 - 77