autofilling from multiple columns

[Monyca]

Hello!  I'm new to this community, and have very little training with Excel.  I pulled a report with data in about 6 columns.  I'm trying to generate passwords for students in a 7th column that is based on information in 2 existing columns.  I've done this before, and after about 5-6 manual entries, Excel figured out what I was doing and autofilled the rest for me.  It's not working now though!  Any ideas what I can try?  I have one column with student birthdays in number format (mo/day/ year) and then 9 digit student IDs in another column.  I need 8 digit passwords with the birth month, birth date, and last four digits of the student ID.  I hope this makes sense, and I hope someone can help!  I don't want to do 600 manual entries!  Thanks in advance!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@Monyca For some reason, the Flash Fill feature doesn't recognise the pattern you are trying to create. Difficult to judge why without seeing your real data. But, since you already know exactly how you want to build the passwords, you could use a formula. Assume column A holds the dates (in date format mm/dd/yyyy) and column B holds the Student IDs, with a header on the first row.

=TEXT(A2,"mmdd")&RIGHT(B2,4)

Enter the above in G2 (your 7th column) and copy it down.

[#3]

@Monyca 

In general I'd don't trust to FlashFill except quite simple cases, you always have to recheck if it works correctly or not. Formula is much more reliable way.

[#4]

Thank you!