Microsoft Excel Auto Fill Tutorial

Microsoft Excel Auto Fill is something a lot of people do not know about but it can be extremely useful and save a lot of time. Have you ever needed to setup an Excel spreadsheet that contains a list of dates, days or numbers that follow a pattern i.e. you might be creating a rota for your team and you need to make a list of each day of the week down the side of the spreadsheet, normally you would have to enter each day in manually until you had the right number of rows for your rota. By using Microsoft Excel Auto Fill you can do this very easily and quickly, follow the steps below to learn how to create lists automatically in Excel.

1. Open up a new workbook in Microsoft Excel, enter the following information on a new spreadsheet shown below.

2. Now click on cell A2 keep the mouse button held down and drag the pointer to A4 and release the mouse button to select the values Monday-Wednesday as shown below.

3. You will notice there is a little square at the bottom right of the selected cells, this is called the fill handle, if you drag and drop the fill handle down to cell A11 and release the mouse button will now see that the values of days have been automatically filled in for you. By default for days it fills the cells in with a 7 day week, this may or may not be useful, however in most cases you will only need a 5 day week Monday to Friday…………. this is easy to change. After you let go of the mouse button before you would have noticed that a little box appear, this will allow you to access the Auto Fill menu, click on the downward arrow and the menu appears, you will see an option called fill weekdays, select this your list now only shows values Monday to Friday.

4. Microsoft Excel Auto Fill can also be used to automatically fill in numbers and dates as well as giving you the ability to create your own custom lists, below shows a mixture of different lists you can use with the Microsoft Excel Auto Fill feature, type them in and repeat the above steps of using the Microsoft Excel Auto Fill feature go ahead and have a play around and see what the results are, have a think about how you can use this uility in your daily job.

5. Have fun!!!

Thank you thanking reading this tutorial we hope you enjoyed it, if you would like to learn more about Microsoft Excel or any other Microsoft Office product please visit our website to view our onsite Office 2007 training.

Tutorial provided by Edatum IT Solutions.