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Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #345, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

A couple of weeks ago I was looking over a Google Sheet with my wife (we help each other with business problems).

My wife was extracting town names from a list of addresses and used the Smart Fill feature to automate it. She extracted the first two examples and then Smart Fill did the rest.

"Woah, hang on a sec", I said "show me that again."

I didn't realize that Smart Fill can now help with more complex tasks. I assumed that it was still only useful for extending obvious series like 1,2,3,etc.

Check out today's tip about the Smart Fill feature below.

➜ Membership

This week in the Sheets Insiders Membership, we're looking at using Apps Script to build small utility tools.

Apps Script is an amazing tool that can be used to fill in the gaps in Workspace tools. We can use it to solve problems when built-in functions or features don't exist.

In this week's Sheets Insiders example, we're building a small tool to extract URL links from text and to automatically activate plain text links, at scale. Both recent pain points for me.

Join today to get this video tutorial and template, plus access to the entire archives.

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➜ Sheets Tip #345: Smart Fill

Consider this list of restaurants:

Suppose we want to extract the town for each of these restaurants.

So we start by writing the first one "Shepherdstown". Something magical happens when we write the second one.

Smart Fill pops up and says "hey, I'll do the rest for you!"

Smart Fill generates a fairly complex formula to solve this particular challenge.

The result is a completed list of town names:

As a last step, we should change these live formulas to static text values, so there's no danger of them breaking.

Highlight the column of town names. Copy them.

Right click and select Paste special > Values only

Another Way To Access Smart Fill

Smart Fill can toggled with the shortcut:

• ⌘ + Shift + Y (Mac), or
• Ctrl + Shift + Y (PC)

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. I need tires. And whilst you're at it...​

(The real story is an incredible case study in timeless marketing.)