Autofill list is a great feature of Excel that saves you time and effort when entering data. It works by filling cells with data that follows a pattern or is based on the data in other cells.
You may have a series of office and sales regions, products or specific business time units (quarters and semi-annuals) that you enter repeatedly. If you have this kind of list in Excel, it would be a good idea to create a customized Autofill list so that the information can be automatically filled into empty cells.
The first step is to open the Excel options dialog box and click on “custom lists.” You will see a list of all the system-defined autofill list entries. You can also create your own user-defined custom list in this dialog box by typing the name of each entry.
Another way to create an autofill list is by using a macro. For example, to get the month names in a cell range, you can use a macro that looks for a formatted series of numbers and then copies those numbers into each of the cells.
Once the series of numbers are copied into each cell, you can then drag the Fill Handle across the list to fill all the cells in that range with them. You can do this in any direction, up, down or right.
A fill handle is a small green square that appears on the bottom right corner of every cell. It changes to a black plus sign on dragging or hovering the mouse over it.
The Fill Handle is a vital part of the AutoFill feature in Excel. It is used to copy values or formulas into adjacent cells, and can also be used to fill a series of cells with different types of numbers.
You can also use the Fill Handle to automatically fill in a series of dates, months or days. To do this, select the first two cells in a series of dates and then drag the Fill Handle in the desired direction to automatically fill the rest of the series.
When a series of days is autofilled, the day number remains the same but the month number changes. For example, when a series of dates is filled with the weeks ending in October, only the weekdays are displayed.
This option is especially useful if you have a list of business hours, and want to automatically fill in the hours for each week of the year. Similarly, it’s also a good idea to fill in a series of years and months so that you can automatically calculate tax and other related fees.
If you want to manually fill in a series of dates, you can use the Linear Series option. This is a more advanced method of creating an AutoFill list, but it can be a bit confusing.
There are a couple of ways to create an autofill list in Excel, and each is slightly different. To learn more about these techniques, check out this short video that shows you how to use the Series dialog box and create a list of dates.
