41–49 of 49 posts
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...
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...
Alternatively, this video: https://youtu.be/fRjsK-NXVEA (Key word: "Maruary".)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, if you would like to do more than substring extraction, say convert "FirstName LastName" into "f.l." or "lastname, firstname", then Text2Columns won't be sufficient by itself. You would need to do more post-processing or would need a more sophisticated scripting capability.
This is very cool and I was unaware of this feature. Are there any open source libraries that perform similar tasks? I can think of a few uses for this in data cleanup as long as it can handle the input not being super clean.
How does it handle middle name, or composite first name and second name ?
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 may consider watching this 5-minute video segment starting at 4:30 to get a sense of the current scope of Flash Fill (i.e., when it is expected to work, and when it isn't): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1YXge3C8RI&t=270s>
I'm a very occasional Excel user, I can never seem to get it to do what I want on real spreadsheets -- it always trounces my number formats, or background colours, or repeats a short-periodic series instead of creating a series over the whole range. Seems like it could use an idiot mode with a pop-up box with options like "don't change any styles" and "make a series over the whole range" that also gives tips like "us…
That touches an important point of this kind of "automation magic" in autocompletion tools. They are great when they guess your intent correctly, and terrible when they misfire - specially when, as is common with Microsoft's tools, they are applied automatically and you have to take extra action to reverse them. It annoys me that they research and apply complex algorithms to analyse the available data, detect the mos…
What I meant to say was that such a rich interactivity should not be the default experience for simple and common cases. For simple and common cases, the technology should just work automatically without requiring much user interaction, thereby promoting usability and discoverability. However, you are absolutely right that for more sophisticated cases, instead of letting the user fall off the cliff, we should invest in a rich interactive experience where the AI can partner with the user to help complete more sophisticated tasks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That touches an important point of this kind of "automation magic" in autocompletion tools. They are great when they guess your intent correctly, and terrible when they misfire - specially when, as is common with Microsoft's tools, they are applied automatically and you have to take extra action to reverse them. It annoys me that they research and apply complex algorithms to analyse the available data, detect the mos…
I absolutely agree with you! The next version of Flash Fill that we are aspiring to build will not only handle a much larger class of transformations, but will hopefully also show you the code, and suggest you corner cases for inspection and soliciting more examples from the user. Allowing the user to browse through multiple alternatives is also a good idea. What I meant to say was that such a rich interactivity shou…
The thing is I'm a firm believer in putting the user at the centre of decision-making in automated processes, especially in AI tools that combine multiple sources of data without a clear of model of how they arrive to their solutions.
Too often these process provide their result as a foregone conclusion, and leave the user helpless if it is not the right one. By providing hints on how the process has arrived at that outcome, the user can form a mental model of how it works and learn how to use it more efficiently, or for which situations it is not suitable.