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Sheets Tip 345: Use Sheets On Easy Mode With Smart Fill
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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. ➜ MembershipThis 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.
➜ Sheets Tip #345: Smart FillConsider 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 FillSmart Fill can toggled with the shortcut:
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Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #344, your Monday Tuesday* morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! * coming to your inbox on a Tuesday because many folks have a long weekend for Easter. In today's reader-inspired example, we're going to look at a common, but tricky, conditional formatting example: How to highlight values in one range based on activity in a different range? Today we'll look at how to create a conditional formatting rule to highlight...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #343, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form. Thanks for all the well wishes I received to last week's email! I'm two weeks into the recovery from sinus surgery and things are slowly but surely returning to (a new) normal. I'm taking daily walks around my neighborhood, going slightly further each day. For the first couple of days I needed my wife as a support to hold on to, as I shuffled up and down the...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #342, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! Whew, it's been quite the week in my household. Last week I had sinus surgery to alleviate some long-standing sinus issues I've had. It was a nearly 6-hour surgery so I was completely out-of-it for a day or two afterwards. When I came round they asked if I wanted a drink. I said "some water" but I couldn't speak clearly because of the bandages etc. The nurse...