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Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

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Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#31

Post by CraigJPerry »

agumonkey wrote: post #21
CraigJPerry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one advantage of the world switching to webapps over desktop apps. It’s trivial for me to create a chrome extension that enriches or modifies the UI of a bought product. Add an extra menu of common tasks- no problem. Add a datalist dropdown of options to a textbox where the options come from another service dynicamlly? - again no bother but usability of the vendor product went up substantially.

Potentially only, where i work, browsers are managed by IT, no way to patch stuff, no devtools. Also depending on the design, adding your code may never work unless you reverse the whole codebase (the app in place is extremely stateful, all a.href are replaced by procedural js calls). Don't laugh but I had more results scripting mouse/keyboard automation on 90s oracle GUIs [0] than the app I mentioned above. [0] I co…

Ahh that sucks royally. I've been in similar and it's soul sucking!

    
      The job market's great right now
:-)

Hopefully more usefully as a comment - browsers are super hackable, you might be able to use a javascript bookmarklet to effect some improvements. Something like this https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#32

Post by II2II »

willhinsa wrote: post #11
MrHus wrote: post #6

If you do not know what flash fill is, like me, this page shows a video of the feature: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/save-time-with-fl...

Seems like a lot more work than doing Data > Text to Columns :)

As someone who has been handling delimited text for decades, Text to Columns is the most natural approach. That being said, different people have different backgrounds and approach problems from different angles. Flash Fill may be more appropriate in their cases.

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#33

Post by agumonkey »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #31
agumonkey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially only, where i work, browsers are managed by IT, no way to patch stuff, no devtools. Also depending on the design, adding your code may never work unless you reverse the whole codebase (the app in place is extremely stateful, all a.href are replaced by procedural js calls). Don't laugh but I had more results scripting mouse/keyboard automation on 90s oracle GUIs [0] than the app I mentioned above. [0] I co…

Ahh that sucks royally. I've been in similar and it's soul sucking! The job market's great right now :-) Hopefully more usefully as a comment - browsers are super hackable, you might be able to use a javascript bookmarklet to effect some improvements. Something like this https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.

I don't mind the comment above, he's somehow right that html/js is more open to ad-hoc patches than native code. Except when admins forbid you to.

bookmarklets don't allow for injections into the app so it wont work

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#34

Post by leeoniya »

Taniwha wrote: post #25

Let me tell you another story about fill in Excel ..... many years ago when the Mac was getting its very first graphics cards I worked for 3rd party hardware manufacturer who had decided to build our first graphics card, in particular 24-bit screen were deathly slow .... people would switch to 8-bit or even 1-bit to use things like Excel and word processors. I started out intending to design fast vector hardware (bec…

> we could make great hardware and the software guys would just piss it away

my #1 annoyance with web dev at-large.

you load any web page and your CPU spends 90% of its capacity rendering inefficient, shitty, injected ad code. (speaking as someone who tries to squeeze the most out of modern JS JITs and web platform APIs)

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#35

Post by copperx »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #17
st0le wrote: post #12

Fun fact: Powershell 5.1 has a `Convert-String`[1] cmdlet that is a Flash Fill implementation for CLI. You can do these inferences in Command Line. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

I was hoping to browse the source for that cmdlet on github but it’s missing :-(

The code uses program synthesis, which I imagine is unreadable unless you're versed in that field.

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#36

Post by copperx »

thedudeabides5 wrote: post #9

am I the only one that finds this feature distracting and unhelpful? Most of the times the recommendations are wrong, and then it's just more visual noise/keystrokes.

You might be alone in that. Flash Fill saves me from doing so much manual work that I consider it a killer feature of Excel. I will never try another spreadsheet software until they get flash fill functionality (and I believe the feature is encumbered by patents, and hard to replicate anyways unless you are versed in program synthesis).

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#37

Post by mshariff »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #29
tibbar wrote: post #4

> I went from searching for the hardest problem I can solve to searching for the simplest problem that will have the most impact. This is a fantastic framework to pursue when, for instance, joining a new organization. You can quickly have an outsized impact just by looking for common pain points. As a corollary, it’s very useful to spend lots of time using your own product and talking to the users!

Yes, and it's surprisingly easy to find out where to help! The best colleagues and best teams are where there are a lot of "thank you"s. The same is true in the article: "I am indebted in particular to one woman, whose name I will never know". "I also thank the Excel product team for shipping this technology without which this work wouldn’t be as famous." I wish I knew how to reach out to the author (Sumit Gulwani) o…

Do you mean like an index sheet with links so you can then go to the specific page?

We might have something for you…

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#38

Post by jfrunyon »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #18
agumonkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is something I'd pay to be addressed in most companies / institutions. Every tool they buy (physical or digital) is always 60% fit, but adding a few bits on top would propel it above 80% and make everybody's days a bliss. Most applications I've seen are designed for generic tasks, except that workers have a very regular set of tasks, if software could be tailored a bit to this (prefill stuff, save clicks) you cu…

This is one advantage of the world switching to webapps over desktop apps. It’s trivial for me to create a chrome extension that enriches or modifies the UI of a bought product. Add an extra menu of common tasks- no problem. Add a datalist dropdown of options to a textbox where the options come from another service dynicamlly? - again no bother but usability of the vendor product went up substantially.

This is an advantage of open-source (as in source that you can read and modify, not necessarily FOSS), not web, IMO. Webapps are just necessarily open-source (at least the client-side portion).

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#39

Post by CraigJPerry »

jfrunyon wrote: post #38
CraigJPerry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one advantage of the world switching to webapps over desktop apps. It’s trivial for me to create a chrome extension that enriches or modifies the UI of a bought product. Add an extra menu of common tasks- no problem. Add a datalist dropdown of options to a textbox where the options come from another service dynicamlly? - again no bother but usability of the vendor product went up substantially.

This is an advantage of open-source (as in source that you can read and modify, not necessarily FOSS), not web, IMO. Webapps are just necessarily open-source (at least the client-side portion).

Yeah i suppose, if everyone switched to rendering on a canvas element instead of to the DOM then this advantage would shrink away

Re: Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

#40

Post by peterburkimsher »

mshariff wrote: post #37
peterburkimsher wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it's surprisingly easy to find out where to help! The best colleagues and best teams are where there are a lot of "thank you"s. The same is true in the article: "I am indebted in particular to one woman, whose name I will never know". "I also thank the Excel product team for shipping this technology without which this work wouldn’t be as famous." I wish I knew how to reach out to the author (Sumit Gulwani) o…

Do you mean like an index sheet with links so you can then go to the specific page? We might have something for you…

An index sheet would be a good start!

Being able to organise it into a hierarchy, like a file system, with folders and subfolders, is what I'm imagining. Selecting a Sheet Folder would show the concatenated data from all sub-sheets, like iTunes Playlist Folders.

Something like this:

http://peterburk.free.fr/ExcelSheetMenus.png

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