Usually Flash Fill starts automatically, and you only need to provide a pattern. Those of you who prefer working from a keyboard most of the time, can run Flash Fill with this key combination: Ctrl + E How to use Flash Fill in Excel In Excel 2019, Excel 2016, and Excel 2013, the Flash Fill tool resides on the Data tab, in the Data tools group: All this is done in milliseconds in the background, and the user sees the results almost immediately! Where is Flash Fill in Excel? 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.įlash 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.Įach 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. The Flash Fill feature was introduced in Excel 2013 and is available in all later versions of Excel 2016, Excel 2019, and Excel for Microsoft 365. How to enable/disable Flash Fill in ExcelĮxcel Flash Fill is a special tool that analyzes the information you are entering and automatically fills data when it identifies a pattern.And it does so quickly and simply without you having to do a thing, but only provide an example of what you want. It grabs a tedious task that would take hours to be performed manually and executes it automatically in a flash (hence the name). The tutorial explains the basics of the Flash Fill functionality and provides examples of using Flash Fill in Excel.įlash Fill is one of the most amazing features of Excel.

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