Excel offers several nice ways to efficiently copy form a single cell to adjacent cells. One of these ways is the Copy-Fill process. Efficient techniques are always of value, and copy-fill is most useful.
Let's explore this feature using a specific example. Suppose you wanted to get a series of "TSU's" in column B. You could type each one or you could use the Fill process.
 |
 |
| The task is to add 9 more entries like Cell B1. | First select the cell containing the TSU and drag down to Cell B10. |
Then we will select Edit + Fill + Down to tell Excel to copy the contents of the selected cell to the cells going down to the end of the selected region.
(Note the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+D and Ctrl+R)
Results!!!
While we don't consider ourselves to be lazy, why take the extra effort and risk making a typing error. Note that the fill process also copied the format (bold and center) that was active on cell B1 to the rest of the cells.
If
eveybody in your Christmas mailing list was from Columbus,
would you want to type the City and State for everybody? Why not type it
once and Fill Down the rest of the people.
While the fill-down process would be useful if you had to type 500 sentences like "I will not pull Mary-Jane's Pigtails", the real benefit comes in producing formulas and functions that are similar.
Consider this example of similar formulas.
| A |
B |
C |
D |
|
| 1 |
Number 1 |
Number 2 |
Sum |
Product |
| 2 |
3 |
6 |
=A2 + B2 |
=A2 * B2 |
| 3 |
2 |
8 |
=A3 + B3 |
=A3 * B3 |
| 4 |
13 |
235 |
=A4 + B4 |
=A4 * B4 |
| 5 |
25 |
31 |
=A5 + B5 |
=A5 * B5 |
The formulas differ by what row they are on. Consider using the Fill Down process rather than risk typing errors with so many keystrokes.
|
A |
B |
C |
D |
|
|
1 |
Number 1 |
Number 2 |
Sum |
Product |
|
2 |
3 |
6 |
=A2 + B2 |
=A2 * B2 |
|
3 |
2 |
8 |
||
|
4 |
13 |
235 |
||
|
5 |
25 |
31 |
Will Excel know what the correct formula should be? You bet! The copy process is called a Relative Copy. Excel will fill down with the correct formulas and compute the correct sums and products for each cell.
Let's look at a different example.
Suppose you are a manager of a small company with several salesmen. You wish to keep up with the weekly sales of each of your employees as well as keep a running total of the sales each day. You might be interested in a spreadsheet like this.
You would find each salesman's weekly total with the Sum function. If you get it correct in Cell F2, you could use the Fill Down to get it correct for the other employees.
You could keep up with your daily sales by correctly entering the Sum function in Cell B7 and using the Fill Right process to keep up with the daily totals for the rest of the days in the week.
The efficiency of the Fill feature will "smack you in your face" if you had 75 salesmen instead of 4!
Note that you can choose to Fill in any of four ways. Excel provides keyboard shortcuts for the more popular fills. It is well worth leaning your keyboard shortcuts for this and other Excel features.