Filling Patterned Lists in Excel

The video guide shows how to get Excel to auto-fill down cells by dragging down the bottom right corner of a cell in Excel. It also describes how holding CTRL will simply copy the selected cell across a row or down a column.

The benefit of the drag and drop methods is that they are very fast to use. The disadvantage is that you are leaving Excel to interpret the existing data and make an assumption about how to complete the series. To take explicit control over the process, you need to use the Fill menu under Editing on the Home ribbon.

If you simply want to copy one value across a whole range, you can select the range of data you want to fill, click Fill and the direction in which you would move if performing a drag and drop. You can even use keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+D for down, CTRL + R for right). This is an efficient method for filling a range with a single value where Excel's drag and drop might not give the desired output.

To control the nature of a filled sequence, you have use Fill->Series. The Autofill option gives the same result as drag and dropping but is clearly slower. It is also quicker to type 1, then 3, then drag and drop to get a list of odd numbers than to define a Step Value of 2 having just typed 1 in a single cell. Although the option to create geometric sequences using Growth is superficially appealing, the Fill function does not allow a user to go back and see the growth factor so it would make more sense to use a formula.