How To Enable Autofill In Excel – Entering predictable or repetitive data into Excel is no fun and may leave you wondering if there is a way to speed up the process.
Great news: It’s here! Excel’s auto-complete features mean you can set up your document to predict data patterns, allowing cells to fill themselves in along the way.
How To Enable Autofill In Excel
AutoFill is the way Excel knows exactly what you want to do next and does the work for you. It’s a comprehensive way to define various built-in functions that save you keystrokes and time by selecting patterns and filling in values to reduce manual input.
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AutoComplete appears in a variety of ways—sometimes by copying the formula into adjacent cells, other times by filling in a list of days or months, or by looking for formatting and applying it to blank cells. Ready to learn how to know when Excel is giving you a hand?
Each active cell (the one your cursor is currently in) has a fill handle. It’s a small green square in the lower right corner of the active cell.
The fill handle can be used to repeat a value by simply going to the cell that contains the desired value and dragging the fill handle to the desired cells to display the same value. This fill works whether the cells in the range to be filled are empty or contain values. If they have values, the values are overwritten.
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If we go to cell B5 and drag the fill handle to cell B9, the price of the orchid, peony, rose, and tulip will now change to $19.
In other cases, there is a clear pattern that must be met. A pattern can be a trend of numbers, days or months that increases or decreases by a certain amount. In this case, you’d rather have it auto-populate than go through the tedium of manual entry.
In the columns on the right we want to enter the remaining months of the year. All we have to do is highlight the two cells A1 and B1, then drag the fill handle of B1 until we reach “Dec”.
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Since we’ve made cell A1 our active cell, Excel understands that “January” followed by “February” represents the sequence “January, February…”. This forms the beginning of a pattern that our assistant will use to complete the task.
We are on a roll now. Let’s enter the first few numbers in a row and use AutoFill to copy them to empty cells.
Of course, we have to cancel a few more days in certain months, but you get the idea. Not entering these numbers one by one will save you some serious time (and possibly your sanity).
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Instead of copying and pasting when you want to copy the formula to adjacent cells, Automula comes to the rescue again. The fill handler combines relative, absolute, and mixed cell references in a formula to understand which part(s) should be the same as the parent and which part(s) should be relative to the row and column it belongs to.
In the above scenario, Excel is smart enough to know where your data ends up, so the double-click trick works. If there are gaps in your data that make it difficult for Excel to determine where the data ends, you may need to drag to the end of the data set.
Speaking of formulas, have you noticed that when you start typing the first few letters of an Excel function, Excel suggests a list of functions that start with the letters you typed? If you press the Tab key, Excel will complete the name of the first function in the list and the open parenthesis. Alternatively, you can go to the arrow you want, press the Tab key, and finish by entering arguments and closing parentheses.
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After completing the AutoComplete command, you may notice a small icon in the lower right corner of the fill container.
When you click this icon, you’ll see some options that allow you to undo the action taken by the autocomplete feature:
So if you’ve completed a series on a pattern that Excel picked up, but you want to copy the existing values, you’ll choose Copy Cells.
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There are all kinds of styles when it comes to dates. It could be every day, every week, every two weeks – you get the picture. We can still get autofill to work when date patterns aren’t obvious by using serial settings.
For example, let’s say we want to prepare a payroll schedule for this year that starts on January 15th. We can enable the context menu using
What if your frequently used list is something special that Excel can’t predict, like the names of your team members, or your branch locations or product categories? These are likely to be details that you will need to enter repeatedly and you may want a way to quickly enter them when needed instead of entering them one at a time. There is great news.
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Your custom list is now ready to use with AutoFill. Just enter the first item, drag the fill handle, and Excel will fill in the rest of your list.
Here is a little tip worth mentioning. You can also use the Fill command on the Home tab to perform many of the tasks we’ve seen above.
In the range below we have four cells of text that we want to be all in one cell. In other words, we want to combine or combine all these values.
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There are actually several ways to do this in Excel, and the option you choose usually involves using a function or at least the and operator.
For some reason, the Fill button in the Edit group on the Home tab appears here with a solution.
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If you want to convert data from one format to another or extract specific values from a source data set, you can teach Excel what you want your data to look like by entering the first two or three rows in the desired format.
Then click the last value you entered and click the Fill Flash icon on the Data tab in the Data Tools command group.
In fact, sometimes Excel will pick up a pattern without you having to “train”. When the AutoComplete function thinks it has found a fill pattern that is blinking, it will suggest this scheme by showing a gray version of what you want your fill data to look like. It is like predictive text as we see in other forms of technology. Simply press the Tab key on your keyboard to accept.
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Somewhat related to autofill is autofill. AutoComplete is a feature where Excel completes text entries when you begin typing in a data column if the first letters you type match what you have previously entered in that column. It’s often useful, but autocomplete can be disabled if you prefer.
To re-enable AutoComplete, follow steps 1 and 2 above, and then check the Enable AutoComplete for Cell Values check box under Editing Options.
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Claudia is a project manager and business skills instructor. In her spare time, she reads mystery novels and does genealogy research.
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Autofill in Excel. Do you regularly enter repetitive data or formulas into your spreadsheets? you are not alone. The following tips show you how to use AutoComplete in Microsoft Excel to quickly enter details and repeat formulas like a pro.
Excel can automatically continue a series (list) of numbers, dates, or time periods based on a pattern you set up. You can also set up custom lists and use AutoComplete to automatically repeat to new worksheets.
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Request autofill by selecting the appropriate cells and dragging the fill handle. The fill handle is located in the lower right corner of the selected cells. It appears as a small square in the design around the selected cells.
You can drag the charging case in any direction. Drag it down a column to fill the series or drag it up a column to fill it. Drag it across a row to fill the series to the right (or in).