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Excel’s AutoFill feature can help you enter repeated or incremental text
or numbers quickly. Say, for example, that you have to enter all of the
years from 1990-2010 in a worksheet. Rather than typing each year into a
cell manually, you can take advantage of the AutoFill feature to enter
the data quickly and easily.
By
dragging your pointer down a column, you can make AutoFill enter
consecutively increasing or decreasing values in adjacent cells by what
ever increment is defined between the first two selected cells.
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If you want to
enter all of the years from 1990-2010 into this worksheet. You
can just enter the year 1990 in cell A2 (under the Year label)
and 1991 just below in cell A3.
If you select both
cells, and place your mouse pointer over the small black square
in the lower right corner of the selection, your mouse pointer
will turn into a thin cross +.
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If you hold down
the left mouse button and drag the + pointer down column
A, a small comment box will appear telling you what AutoFill is
putting in each cell. |
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When you see 2010
in the comment box, stop dragging.
The worksheet will
now contain the years 1990-2010. Note that you have to select
two adjacent data items, and they have to change incrementally
for AutoFill to enter the correct consecutive values. If you
selected only1990, and dragged down the column, AutoFill would
enter 1990 into every cell. |
If you
select a single cell and drag the corner with the + pointer
AutoFill will fill the cells you drag over with the value in the
original cell.
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