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One of the features of Excel is the ability to fill in similar values in cells, which is what you are going to learn in this video.

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Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’m going to take a look at Fill and in particular take a look at a new feature of Excel 2013 which is called Flash Fill. But let’s start with the basic Fill facility first.

Even on the basis of what you’ve seen so far, you’ll realize by now that you have a lot of data with Excel and very often the data is there to help to categorize or form headings for other data. You have data related to Dates and Time, sizes, lengths, all sorts of numerical data in particular. And very often you need to establish headings or categories where there is a distinct pattern. Let me give you an example. Let’s suppose that you were doing a company’s accounts for the last year.

You could probably realize even if you don’t do a lot of accountancy work yourself that you probably need to put all the months of the last year into columns or rows on a worksheet. One of the features of Excel, which is one of its great strengths, is the ability to fill in similar values in cells. I’m going to show you a very straightforward example of that now. Let’s suppose that in this empty workbook I type in the Cell B2. I’m just going to type January. Now if I hover over that little black square in the corner of the selection rectangle around B2, the one we mentioned before. It’s actually called the Fill handle. Let me pull it now. I’m using the Fill handle and I’ve pulled the cell right out to Column M.

Now I’m going to release it and look what Excel does for me. It looks at what I’ve put in B2. It says January. It recognizes January as a month of the year and as I fill to the right it fills in the other months. Now that may or may not be what I wanted to do and I’ll come back to that question in a moment. But very often it is what I want to do and very often that’s really helpful because it avoids the need for me to go through and type in all of those month names.

Now Excel is certainly not restricted to dealing with months and there are various sorts of Fill that you can use. Let’s try a different one. I’ve selected Cell B4. I’m typing a one in there, B5 type a two in there, select both cells, and pull the handle down, the Fill handle. Now as I pull if you look to the right of where the cursor is, you’ll see Excel is almost thinking out loud in a way there.

It’s saying that’s 6, that’s 7, 8, 9. It’s showing me what it’s thinking as it goes through and when I go down to here and release I can see that it’s managed to fill in what I’m going to refer to as a Series here. So it’s intelligently from the fact that I put a one in first and then a two, Excel looks at what I’ve done and assumes how I want the Series to continue. So as I do the fill in there it just carries on, on the same pattern. It says well one, two so the next one must be three, the next one must be four, and so on.

Now it doesn’t have to be a sequence just like that. So let me just Undo that, go back to when I just had those two cells and I’m going to change the value in two to four, select the two cells again. It’s very important that I select them both so that Excel can see the pattern. Starting at one, then going to four, now watch what happens as I fill down. Now it realizes I want to count up in threes. So it’s absolutely fine. It’s happy with counting up in threes and that’s exactly what it does.

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