“Even people who aren’t familiar with Excel can use the feature. “Flash Fill brings the power of text manipulation to the hands of common, non-technical, everyday users,” says Chad Rothschiller, a program manager with the Excel 2013 team who worked closely with Gulwani. The user needs just to click to accept them all.įlash Fill works for dozens of tasks: removing or adding formatting to names or other word groups, correcting inconsistencies in punctuation or the use of symbols such as brackets, converting dates of birth from something such as 8-4-1954 to 8/4/54, and many others. Flash Fill immediately fills in all rows below the example with properly formatted figures.
An Excel user simply creates a new column adjacent to the existing column, then types in the correct example: 123-45-6789. How does Flash Fill work? Let’s say an Excel user has a column of Social Security numbers.
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. 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. Gulwani credits an interdisciplinary approach to helping make Flash Fill possible. 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. 29, and it is sure to be popular with users. 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.
And that made me think: Maybe this is the next problem I should solve.” “But when I got home, I opened my own laptop and looked for Excel search words. “I had to admit to her that I knew next to nothing about Excel,” Gulwani recalls.
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