MicrosoftThis looks like a bad idea. It seems like AI is behind it, partly because you need a copilot subscription for the Windows version, but it’s just the simple Flash Fill engine working for you. And that is noticeable: First of, it does a very poor job on your first three examples working with names. It seems to have no clue about your new TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER functions and it doesn’t make a formula that still works when people expand their tables with less perfect example-names than yours. In fact, because of the great inconsistency of the construction of human names, one would probably be best of making a rather complex formula that uses your beautiful new REGEX functionality.
The second poor result in your examples are the two with the numbered column to the left of a table. These go wrong when the user decides to move the table or to add or delete rows above the table. Of course, a simple solution would be to use the formula =ROW()-ROW(myTable[#Headers]) instead of =ROW()-1.
In a nutshell: Flash fill is a handy tool that can in specific situations even do more than “Text to columns”, but both functions are meant to use on static data. Leave Flash Fill formula-free as it is and don’t try to change it into a dynamic functionality with poor non-dynamic formulas. The only alternative is to make it part of a well working AI-formula engine, but I think Microsoft still has some work to do before that is a fact.
