The good news is you can teach computers to be smarter. Or separating an address that's in one column into separate street address, city, state, and Zip Code columns or fields. Oftentimes, we'll need to work with data that needs to be split up like this, separating the first name and last name of a contact that's in an Excel column, for example, into separate columns. Nor will it know that Bob bought an apple unless it recognizes your comma-separated list as such. And when you see that Bob bought apple, carrot, banana, pig you know that he bought each item-not an unholy apple-carrot-banana-pig conglomerate.Ĭomputers, however, take everything you tell them literally, so if an app has First Name and Last Name fields and you give it Bob Tester, it won't know what to do (or maybe it will put Bob Tester into the first field and give you an error because the last name field is empty). You're smart, and when you look at the text Bob Tester, you quickly recognize that an individual with the first name Bob has the unfortunate surname of Tester.
