2. Introducing Flash Fill and Quick Analysis

If you are overwhelmed by the many features in Excel, the new Quick Analysis provides an easy on-ramp to trying out formulas, charts, subtotals, and pivot tables. Many times, a person will ask how to do something in Excel. When he hears the answer is a pivot table, he shakes his head and says he was looking for something simpler. The Quick Analysis solves many problems without making you go through the steps to create a chart or a pivot table.

The Flash Fill feature saves you time when you are trying to reshape imperfect data. Many times, you get data from somewhere that isn’t in the right format—the text is all caps, phone numbers appear without dashes, or a bunch of fields are jammed into a single ...

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