{"id":361811,"date":"2017-02-06T08:48:49","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T16:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=361811"},"modified":"2017-02-06T08:48:49","modified_gmt":"2017-02-06T16:48:49","slug":"flash-fill-flashextract","status":"publish","type":"msr-video","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/video\/flash-fill-flashextract\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash Fill and FlashExtract"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>99% of computer users do not know programming and struggle with repetitive tasks. Programming by Examples (PBE) can revolutionize this landscape by allowing end users to create small scripts from input-output examples. A killer application of this technology today is in the space of data cleaning. Apparently, data scientists spend 80% of their time wrangling with data. In this short video, I will demonstrate the PBE concept using two data preparation features: (i) The Flash Fill feature in Microsoft Excel that allows performing syntactic string transformations from examples. (ii) The FlashExtract technology (available as the ConvertFrom-string cmdlet in Powershell and Custom Logs\/Fields feature in Microsoft OMS) that allows parsing custom log files into structured tables by giving examples of various fields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>99% of computer users do not know programming and struggle with repetitive tasks. Programming by Examples (PBE) can revolutionize this landscape by allowing end users to create small scripts from input-output examples. A killer application of this technology today is in the space of data cleaning. Apparently, data scientists spend 80% of their time wrangling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":361814,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[13560],"msr-video-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-361811","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/w-k9WjRJvIY","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/361811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/361811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=361811"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=361811"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=361811"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=361811"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=361811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}