Leverage FLASH FILL to make your Excel life easier.

FLASH FILL predicts what you are trying to accomplish and offers to complete filling in all the results using the pattern.

FLASH FILL should automatically be offered by Excel when it senses a pattern. If not, CTRL + E is the keyboard shortcut to manually run the FLASH FILL function.

In this example, the first 2 lines of phone numbers were entered as combined with area code. Key in CTRL + E and the remaining phone numbers populate.

List of phone number data

Clicking on the FLASH FILL dropdown reveals options.

FLASH FILL Option

Combining several cells into a mailing address. Type the first desired result and then CTRL + E

List of address data

FLASH FILL or Ctrl + E Results

Results are almost magical. No need to build a formula to combine fields and drag and copy. Just enter the first one and let Excel do all the rest of the work.