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Excel: Cracking the code for UK Postcodes

You’re not alone. You’re certainly not the only one. It can be difficult to manage these alphanumeric games when you’re blindfolded. Do not fret! UK postcode list excel can help you out.

Imagine you’ve got an address list longer than the length of your arm and need to sort it by postcode. This task is as appealing as watching the paint dry. Excel can be compared to a Swiss Army knife when it comes to data management.

Let’s begin by talking about how to import your list of postcodes into Excel. Simple as pie! Simply open Excel and click on “File”, then “Open”, to select your file. Voila! Now that you have the data, it’s time to do some magic!

Sorting postcodes without oxygen might feel like climbing Everest. You’ll be surprised to learn that it is easier than you thought. Sort A to Z by selecting the column that has your postcodes. Boom! You’re done!

Wait, there’s more. What if there are specific areas you’d like to exclude? Perhaps you are only interested in London Postcodes beginning with “E”. Lemon squeezy is easy peasy. Click on the “filter” icon located at the top of the column for your postcode and enter “E*”. Presto! Only London East postcodes are displayed.

Now let’s take it to the next level with conditional format. Imagine that you wanted to highlight any Manchester postcodes beginning with “M”. Click on the column that contains your postcode, select ‘Conditional formatting’ in the Home> tab, and then choose a ‘New Rule.’ Then, click ‘Use Formula’. You can type =LEFT (A1,1)=”M”, assuming that A1 is your first code. Choose a color you like and click on OK.

Got duplicates? It’s no problem! Select the column you want to remove again, and click on the Data tab. Click ‘Remove duplications’. Select the columns that you wish to check (in this example, only the postcode column) and click on OK.

For those who enjoy pivot tables, (and who does not? These tables are perfect for summing up large amounts of data quickly. You can insert one by selecting ‘Insert>PivotTable. Drag and drop your postcode into the Values and Rows boxes to quickly count each code.

VLOOKUP, a tool so convenient it would be criminal not to use. Imagine you have another sheet with regions that correspond to each postcode and you would like to display this information beside each address in the main sheet. Use VLOOKUP like so: =VLOOKUP(LEFT(A2,2),Sheet2!A:B,2,FALSE). This formula checks the first two letters of each postcode on Sheet1 (starting in cell A2) against Sheet2’s range A:B and returns matching regions names from column A.

Finaly, and this is where it gets really exciting, you can map these codes using Excel’s 3D Maps function under “Insert”. Visualize geographic information without breaking a shin!

Excel can be used to manipulate UK postcodes. Sorting, filtering and even visualizing regions can be done in Excel.

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