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Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by MrHus on Saturday September 18, 2021 @01:30AM (#28573906)
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...

Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by duskwuff on Saturday September 18, 2021 @01:34AM (#28573922)
Alternatively, this video:

https://youtu.be/fRjsK-NXVEA

(Key word: "Maruary".)

Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by sumitgulwani on Sunday September 19, 2021 @05:12PM (#28587965)
Cool find! The 100-second video segment starting at 10:43 in this link that I am sharing would be more fun: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=421gU482xFE&t=643s>
Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by sumitgulwani on Sunday September 19, 2021 @05:05PM (#28587915)
Here's an illustrative demo of the Flash Fill capability. Check out the 3 minute video segment starting at 4:30. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1YXge3C8RI&t=270s>
Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by willhinsa on Saturday September 18, 2021 @02:37AM (#28574206)
Seems like a lot more work than doing Data > Text to Columns :)
Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by II2II on Saturday September 18, 2021 @08:21AM (#28575648)
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.
Re:Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel by sumitgulwani on Sunday September 19, 2021 @05:17PM (#28588010)
Yes, text to Columns would work well for splitting tasks in a very uniform dataset. However, if you want to extract say Lastname from a column containing names some of which may have middle names (i.e., the dataset is not very uniform), then text to columns would not work correctly.

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.