Sometimes filling works fine, and other times it doesn't work as you expect. First select the cell that has the formula you want to fill, then select the cells to the right of it, and then press Ctrl+R. You can also press Ctrl+R to fill the formula to the right in a row. First select the cell that has the formula you want to fill, then select the cells underneath it, and then press Ctrl+D. Giving control to the user would make the technique more robust in my opinion instead of being hit-or-miss.You can also press Ctrl+D to fill the formula down in a column. If, once the work is done, the user were allowed to see what the process was to detect the data, and were allowed to choose between the discarded options or give additional clues as to what the original intention was (the "active-learning session with the user to resolve the ambiguity" that the author of the article discards), the technique could be controlled more precisely and be useful in more situations, not just the ones that work the first time. It annoys me that they research and apply complex algorithms to analyse the available data, detect the most likely ways to fill the document, build alternative programs to solve the problem and rank which is the most useful only to then choose one of the inferred options and discard all the rest of the analysis work, getting only a (possibly incorrect) guess of the data completion task. They are great when they guess your intent correctly, and terrible when they misfire - specially when, as is common with Microsoft's tools, they are applied automatically and you have to take extra action to reverse them. That touches an important point of this kind of "automation magic" in autocompletion tools. But from a usability perspective, it would make some of our Excel documents with hundreds of Sheets much easier to navigate. From a programming perspective I know that it's really hard to do hierarchical nested databases. Clicking on the Sheet Folder would bring up a menu, which I could then navigate to find a sub-sheet. Like bookmarks folders, or Playlist Folders in iTunes, clicking on the Sheet Folder would show every row inside, concatenated into a giant Sheet. I wish I knew how to reach out to the author (Sumit Gulwani) or other people in the Excel product team, about a feature that would be really hard to code but really useful to me. "I also thank the Excel product team for shipping this technology without which this work wouldn’t be as famous." "I am indebted in particular to one woman, whose name I will never know". Yes, and it's surprisingly easy to find out where to help! The best colleagues and best teams are where there are a lot of "thank you"s. we could make great hardware and the software guys would just piss it away Not just MS: Pagemaker? did something stupid that invalidated the font cache many times a page, Quark? put 2 blank spaces at the end of every line that caused ATM to do stupid N*2 clipping behaviour. I started out intending to design fast vector hardware (because autocad was a thing back then), the end though some serious benchmarking of real world usage meant that we zeroed in on simply making solid fills go really gas (Gbytes/sec, faster than any SGI machine of the time) - one of the big surprises was how fast Excel went with just this hardware speedup - turns out that at times excel would clear a window up to 9 times before ever drawing a useful pixel - all those 'important' black pixels I wanted to make hardware for (character rendering and vectors) were just noise in the traces. people would switch to 8-bit or even 1-bit to use things like Excel and word processors. many years ago when the Mac was getting its very first graphics cards I worked for 3rd party hardware manufacturer who had decided to build our first graphics card, in particular 24-bit screen were deathly slow. Let me tell you another story about fill in Excel.
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