• • • • • By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center In December 2009, Sumit Gulwani, a senior researcher at, was flying home from a seminar after presenting his work devising ways to. Sitting next to him was a businesswoman. She was delighted to learn that Gulwani was both a Ph.D. In computer science and a Microsoft employee.

She popped open her laptop and asked, “Is there a way to merge two columns in, when one column has a first name, the other the last, so that a column has both first and last names?” Gulwani paused. “I had to admit to her that I knew next to nothing about Excel,” Gulwani recalls. “But when I got home, I opened my own laptop and looked for Excel search words. I found hundreds of help topics.

Flash Fill is a very popular feature that is now available in Excel for Mac. Some people have reported that Flash Fill is working using Control-e in this weeks general release update version 16.14. Flash Fill is fully supported next month when version 16.15 becomes available. Start to type the next name, and, as if by magic, Excel provides a preview of the names formatted the way you want. Press Enter, and the names are all filled in for you using the Flash Fill feature, which is new in Excel 2013.

And that made me think: Maybe this is the next problem I should solve.” Solve it he did. In a collaborative effort that spanned both Microsoft Research and the team, Microsoft has introduced a feature in Excel 2013 called.

Flash Fill earned enthusiastic reviews even before Office 2013 was released Jan. 29, and it is sure to be popular with users. Flash Fill takes tedious tasks now often performed manually in Excel—or by writing one-off programs—and executes them automatically. And it does so simply, requiring only the typing in an example of what the user wants. Interdisciplinary Approach Gulwani credits an interdisciplinary approach to helping make Flash Fill possible.

Excel for Office 365 for Mac Excel 2019 for Mac Excel 2016 for Mac More. Conditional formatting quickly highlights important information In this worksheet, we see the information we want by using conditional formatting, driven by two rules that each contain a formula. The first rule, in.

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. Machine learning, a strong focus of Microsoft Research, provides the ability to rank the most suitable programs Flash Fill uses in a task. 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. But they’re not formatted correctly–they’re 123456789, not 1. An Excel user simply creates a new column adjacent to the existing column, then types in the correct example: 1. Flash Fill immediately fills in all rows below the example with properly formatted figures. The user needs just to click to accept them all. Flash 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 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.

“Even people who aren’t familiar with Excel can use the feature. It takes complex functionality that someone would otherwise have to build in formulas or code and puts it in the hands of common users.” Flash Fill performs these chores in a way that even a newcomer to Excel can appreciate. That’s a big improvement over the previous state of things, in which a user had to know programming to create tools that can automate everyday Excel jobs. But Flash Fill’s big leap is in how it performs Excel tasks.