3 ms·

A chance to use my favourite feature of excel, flash fill: Given: A B a1b2c3 123 2g34 34f5 4l5p6 1.23E+06 Selecting column B w

A chance to use my favourite feature of excel, flash fill: Given: A B a1b2c3 123 2g34 34f5 4l5p6 1.23E+06 Selecting column B with the one example cell and hitting flash fill yields: A B a1b2c3 123 2g34 234 34f5 345 4l5p6 456 1.23E+06 12306 I'd still absolutely love to see the code behind this feature. EDIT: i just noticed an error in the last row, should be 1230000 not 12306. Ahh well.

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
It looks something like: try { return parse_float(text) } catch ParseError { return eval(match(/\d+/g, text).matches.join("")) } Unrelated to the implementation: in what circumstances is flash fill useful?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "I'd still absolutely love to see the code behind this feature." Windows PowerShell has a cmdlet ConvertFrom-String which "supports automatically-generated, example-driven parsing based on the FlashExtract, research work by Microsoft Research."[1]. Then when they open-sourced Powershell, that was one of the cmdlets which did not come over and is no longer supported, so no way to see the source code there, sadly. (Video [2] shows that FlashFill and FlashExtract and Excel / PowerShell uses are related, and he says it generates many possible programs which fit the given examples, and uses 'machine learning based ranking techniques' to choose which one fits best). [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/convertfrom-string?view=powershell-5.1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-k9WjRJvIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-k9WjRJvIY
- tadkar 4y ago
  I think this is the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6079 https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6079
drumhead 4y ago
Ah yes, Flash fill. It always falls at the last hurdle. Nice idea, never quite gets it right.
hbossy 4y ago
Switch to R1C1 Notation. It makes a lot of Excel magic easier to understand.

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago

It looks something like: try { return parse_float(text) } catch ParseError { return eval(match(/\d+/g, text).matches.join("")) } Unrelated to the implementation: in what circumstances is flash fill useful?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jodrellblank 4y ago

> "I'd still absolutely love to see the code behind this feature." Windows PowerShell has a cmdlet ConvertFrom-String which "supports automatically-generated, example-driven parsing based on the FlashExtract, research work by Microsoft Research."[1]. Then when they open-sourced Powershell, that was one of the cmdlets which did not come over and is no longer supported, so no way to see the source code there, sadly. (Video [2] shows that FlashFill and FlashExtract and Excel / PowerShell uses are related, and he says it generates many possible programs which fit the given examples, and uses 'machine learning based ranking techniques' to choose which one fits best). [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/convertfrom-string?view=powershell-5.1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-k9WjRJvIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-k9WjRJvIY

tadkar 4y ago
I think this is the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6079 https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6079

drumhead 4y ago

Ah yes, Flash fill. It always falls at the last hurdle. Nice idea, never quite gets it right.

hbossy 4y ago

Switch to R1C1 Notation. It makes a lot of Excel magic easier to understand.