You’re probably familiar with Excel’s AutoFill feature. You know, when
you drag on the little black blob at the bottom right of the current selection
to fill in empty cells?
No? OK, set up the table you
see to the right, then put the mouse over the blob circled in red. Now drag down
to the last filled-in cell. The formula is copied into all of the cells.
The little black blob is called the Fill Handle (no relation to the
post-classical composer Phil Handel) and you can do a lot more with it than just
drag it with the mouse.
For instance, try double-clicking on the Fill Handle (undo the previous
AutoFill first if you need to). When you double-click a fill handle, Excel
automatically fills down until the cell immediately to the left or right of the
AutoFill cell is empty. Very handy for very long lists. There are a couple of
methods to AutoFill to the right. See SemiAutoFill for details.
A few other things to
try… You usually think of dragging with the mouse as holding down the left
mouse button — the ‘normal’ mouse button. Try dragging the Fill Handle
with the right mouse button and see what happens. (see right).
You get a choice of ways to fill in the list. You can copy the same values
over and over instead of incrementing them, you can use Fill Formats instead of
using the formatting paintbrush, you can choose exponential growth instead of
linear growth for your series. Try it out!
If you type January into a cell and then use AutoFill, Excel is smart enough
to fill in February, March, etc. If you type only Monday, Excel will AutoFill
Tuesday through Sunday and start over with Monday again.
You may have your own list. You may have a list of individuals that you
frequently type in or a list of experimental reagents that you cycle through or
a repeating list of product types. It would be great if you could type in the
first item of the list and then Excel would know how to fill in the rest, right?
It’s called a custom list and you can make your own.