- Flash Fill
Long, long, ago, in an accounting department far, far, away, I got a call from a co-worker downstairs in the marketing department. They had 1000 rows of data in Excel. They needed to transform some data. It was probably taking the area code from one column and the phone number from another column and wrapping them into something that looked like (212) 555-1212.
The marketer had been manually typing the formatted phone numbers into a new column. I walked down to marketing, used a formula like =”(“&C2&”) “&TEXT(D2,”000-0000”). Double-click to copy that down and no more typing.
Had Flash Fill existed, Excel would let you type the first phone number. If you move down to the next cell and start typing the opening parentheses, it “greys ...
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