Mac Users.This is completely Tested and Working Latest Version Mac OS App of Microsoft Excel 2016. Curiously this super-useful feature can only be found in the PC version of Excel. And that made me think: Maybe this is the next problem I should solve.”I think we are going to see more such useful functions in Excel PS. I found hundreds of help topics. “But when I got home, I opened my own laptop and looked for Excel search words. Flash fill is a great Excel tool.“I had to admit to her that I knew next to nothing about Excel,” Gulwani recalls.Flash Fill earned enthusiastic reviews even before Office 2013 was released Jan. In a collaborative effort that spanned both Microsoft Research and the Office 2013 team, Microsoft has introduced a feature in Excel 2013 called Flash Fill. If you use AutoFill often, you’re probably used to double-clicking on the AutoFill handle to fill down a whole column of data, but you might wonder if you could do this more quickly by.Right click, and then click Insert. To split the contents of a cell into multiple cells, use the Text to Columns wizard, flash fill or formulas. Interdisciplinary ApproachTo split a cell in Excel, add a new column, change the column widths and merge cells. And it does so simply, requiring only the typing in an example of what the user wants. Flash Fill takes tedious tasks now often performed manually in Excel—or by writing one-off programs—and executes them automatically.
![]() From here, now that Excel knows our pattern, it should show you. As you can see, Excel detected the pattern, and Flash Fill filled the rest of our cells in this column with only the first name. Then, click the Flash Fill button in the Data Tools section. Excel 2016 Flash Fill Code Based OnBut they’re not formatted correctly–they’re 123456789, not 123-45-6789. And contributions from human-computer-interaction studies underpin Flash Fill’s effort to avoid the discoverability issue associated with new features by automatically invoking the synthesis engine after the user provides indication of a repetitive task.How does Flash Fill work? Let’s say an Excel user has a column of Social Security numbers. Machine learning, a strong focus of Microsoft Research, provides the ability to rank the most suitable programs Flash Fill uses in a task. It relies on his expertise in program verification and program synthesis, an approach to generating small pieces of code based on a user’s needs. Microsoft rebuilt Office to use Apples latest frameworks.Gulwani credits an interdisciplinary approach to helping make Flash Fill possible. ![]() ![]() Sales PitchBut despite the potential of Flash Fill, Gulwani found himself facing a hard sales pitch when he first suggested its inclusion in Office 2013. It then uses machine-learning-based ranking techniques to identify the most likely program from this set. Since the number of programs that are consistent with a small number of examples is so often huge, Flash Fill uses efficient data structures and algorithms to represent and compute these programs. Then, using machine-learning techniques, Flash Fill sorts through these programs to find the one best-suited for the job.Gulwani and his team designed Flash Fill to generalize user examples into a small program, then to run that program on the remaining spreadsheet rows to populate the output column.The underlying technology is based on recent advances in automated program generation from examples. Could it be broadened to cover a few more of the basic scenarios? Can we put this in the hands of basic users? And how much developer time would it take to get the code working inside the Office codebase?“The hard thing about complex technology is making it simple enough. The general idea was really interesting, but we had some questions. That caught the attention of the Office 2013 team, and work began on incorporating the new feature.Rothschiller recalls his first impressions of the feature:“Whenever you see something for the first time,” he says, “it takes a while to sink in—especially if the technology is complex or powerful. It looks too much like magic.’”To show that his idea wasn’t “magic,” So Gulwani spent the next three weeks programming code so he could demonstrate Flash Fill. But we don’t believe you can do this. Gulwani, together with intern Rishabh Singh and Dany Rouhana, a research software-design engineer, worked closely with Rothschiller, as well as Weide Zhong, a senior software engineer on the Office team, to integrate Flash Fill with Excel 2013. And both the Office team and Gulwani’s team worked to port the new feature’s C# programming language into Office’s native C++. Even people who aren’t familiar with Excel can use the feature.”Rothschiller took a lead role in designing the new feature for ease of use. It’s way harder to encode that into a programming language, script, or formula.Now, Rothschiller says, “Flash Fill brings the power of text manipulation to the hands of common, non-technical, everyday users. The most compelling part of the underlying technology is that everyone can look at data and provide some examples of the output they’d like to see. This is a piece of background logic that watches what you’re putting into cells in a column and looks for patterns. Genius.”Added Ars Technica: “One of the shock-and-awe features of the Excel 2013 demo was the “flash fill” feature. Their goals were to ensure that Flash Fill was as fast as possible, so users would not have to wait for it to perform a task.Reviews of Flash Fill from technical journalists who reviewed the release-to-manufacturing version of Excel 2013 have heaped praise on Flash Fill.“Simply type your intended target text in the next field,” wrote Jonathan Bray in PC Pro, “hit the Flash Fill button on the Data Ribbon, and Excel will complete the job for you, splitting out the text all down the appropriate column. Gulwani, Singh, and Zhong, meanwhile, worked to give Flash Fill the intelligence to understand, in most cases, a user’s intent with just one example, and almost never more than two or three. Mips emulator macFor instance, it can help teachers generate multiple similar problems from an example problem, for student practice or for use in exams. However, this technology also has surprising applications in the area of computer-aided education. This new feature is the current buzz among Excel power users.”“To start with,” Gulwani says, “we can perform more sophisticated data—manipulation tasks from examples, such as manipulating data types like numbers and dates, and semi-structured data like tables and webpages. Ultimately, it even could lead to programming robots by examples.”Gulwani says several Microsoft Research people helped make Flash Fill a reality: Ben Zorn, a research manager with Microsoft Research who helped initiate the connections with the Office team Singh, a graduate student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who developed extensions to the core Flash Fill technology Rouhana, who fixed bugs, helped with the product contribution, and, together with Shobana Balakrishnan, principal research program manager with Microsoft Research’s eXtreme Computing Group, helped manage interactions with the Excel team.
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