Flash Fill is the first AI-powered tool introduced in Excel, designed to extract text effortlessly.
Flash Fill can recognize various patterns such as splitting by spaces, commas, hyphens, or combining data with specific characters. It saves time and effort, especially when dealing with large datasets and repetitive formatting tasks. You can use Flash Fill in Excel 2013 and later versions.
Flash Fill in Action
Let's explore various situations where Flash Fill saves time by extracting substrings..
Extract the Last Name in uppercase
- Write the Name you want to extract from A2
- Write it in uppercase even if the source in Camel Case
- In the second row, start to write the first letters of your next extraction
- Validate if the extraction is what you want
Extract the Last Name and Capital First Name
Now, we will perform a more complex extraction. We want to extract the last name, followed by the first letter of the first name in uppercase.
Extract the City Name and the ZipCode
The extraction process is more complex here because we need to select two non-continuous address items.
Reformat the phone number
Flash Fill can also reformat your data. Here, the situation is basic but not easy to handle. We want to enclose the first 3 figures in parentheses and maintain the same pattern for the rest of the number.
Limitations of using Flash Fill
Like any AI tools, using Flash Fill to extract text in Excel has some limitations and potential drawbacks:
- No update: FlashFill extracts data all at once without using formulas. This means the extraction will not be updated if the data is refreshed.
- Data Overwriting: FlashFill can overwrite existing data if you're not careful. You might lose important information if you accidentally apply FlashFill without verifying the results 😱😱😱
- Pattern Recognition Limitation: Flash Fill relies on pattern recognition, so if your data doesn't follow a clear pattern, it might not work as expected. Unpredictable or irregular data might lead to inaccurate results.
- Performance Impact: Applying Flash Fill on large datasets or columns with extensive data can slow down the performance of Excel.
Despite these limitations, Flash Fill remains a valuable tool for many common Excel data cleaning and formatting tasks. Users should know its limitations and verify results to ensure accurate data manipulation.
