5 Excel Autofill Tricks To Build Your Spreadsheets Faster PDF

2/20/2019 5 Excel Autofill Tricks to Build Your Spreadsheets Faster
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5 Excel Autofill Tricks to Build

Your Spreadsheets Faster
By Ryan Dube / February 26, 2018 26-02-2018 / 7 minutes
Ryan Dube
1060 articles
Ryan has a BSc degree in Electrical

Engineering. He's worked 13 years
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in automation engineering, 5 years
Advertisement in IT, and now is an Apps Engineer.
A former Managing Editor of
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and has been featured on national
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Excel auto ll features offer the most effective ways to save time while lling
out spreadsheets.
Most people don’t realize that a lot of the things they do manually can be
automated. For example, maybe you want to apply a formula to only every
second or third row when you drag down to auto ll. Or maybe you want to ll
in all of the blanks in a sheet.
In this article, we’ll show you how to accomplish ve of the most effective
automations for auto lling columns.
1. Fill in Every Other Cell

Mostly anyone who has used Excel for some time knows how to use the
auto ll feature.
You simply click and hold your mouse on the lower right corner of the cell, and
drag it down to apply the formula in that cell to every cell beneath it.
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In the case where the rst cell is just a number and not a formula, Excel would
just automatically ll in the cells by counting upwards by one.
However, what if you don’t want to apply the auto ll formula to every single
cell below it? For example, what if you only want every other cell to Related Articles
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Apply Formula to Every Other Cell
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You can do this by slightly changing your auto ll procedure. Instead of clicking Be an Expert Number
on the rst cell and then dragging down from the lower right corner, you’re Cruncher With This Best
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going to highlight the rst two cells instead. Then, place the mouse at the
lower right corner of the two cells until the cursor changes to a “+”.
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Now hold and drag that down just as you would normally.

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You’ll notice that now instead of auto lling every single cell, Excel only auto lls
every second cell in every block.
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What if those second cells aren’t blank? Well, in that case, Excel will apply the
same rules in the second cell of the rst block you highlighted to every other
cell as well. For example, if the second cell has a “1” in it, then Excel will auto ll
every other cell by counting up by 1.
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You can just imagine how this exibility could greatly enhance how ef ciently
you are able to automatically ll in data in sheets. It’s one of the many ways
Excel helps you save time while dealing with a lot of data.
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2. Autofill to End-of-Data
One thing that people often come across when working on Excel worksheets
in a corporate environment is dealing with massive sheets.
It’s easy enough to drag the mouse cursor from the top to the bottom of a set
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of 100 to 200 rows in order to auto ll that column. But, what if there are
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There is a very quick trick to making this more ef cient. Instead of dragging all
the way down the column, just hold down the shift key on the keyboard. Now
you’ll notice when you place your mouse on the lower right corner of the cell,
instead of a plus icon, it’s an icon with two horizontal, parallel lines.
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Now, all you have to do is double-click that icon and Excel will automatically
auto ll the entire column, but only down to where the adjacent column
actually has data.
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This one trick can save countless hours wasted trying the drag the mouse
down across hundreds or thousands of rows.
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Imagine you’ve been tasked with cleaning up an Excel spreadsheet, and your Subscription
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Well, there’s another trick you can use to ll in only blank cells with whatever
you like.
In the sheet above, your boss wants you to ll in any blank cell with the string
“N/A”. In a sheet with just a few rows, this would be an easy manual process.
But in a sheet with thousands of rows, it would take you an entire day.
So, don’t do it manually. Just select all the data in the column. Then go to the
Home menu, select the Find & Select icon, select Go To Special.
In the next window, select Blanks.
On the next window, you can enter the formula into the rst blank cell. In this
case, you’ll just type N/A and then press Ctrl + Enter so that the same thing
applies to every blank cell found.
If you wanted to, instead of “N/A”, you could type in a formula into the rst
blank cell (or click on the previous value to use the formula from the cell just
above the blank one), and when you press Ctrl + Enter, it’ll apply the same
formula to all of the other blank cells.
This one feature can make cleaning up a messy spreadsheet very fast and
easy.
4. Fill With Previous Value Macro

That last trick actually takes a few steps. You need to click a bunch of menu
items—and reducing clicks is what becoming more ef cient is all about, right?
So let’s take that last trick one step further. Let’s automate it with a macro.
The following macro will basically search through a column, check for a blank
cell and if blank it’ll copy the value or formula from the cell above it.
To create the macro, click on the Developer menu item, and click the Macros
icon.
Name the macro and then click the Create Macro button. This will open a
code editor window. Paste the following code into the new function.
FirstColumn = InputBox("Please enter the column letter.")

FirstRow = InputBox("Please enter the row number.")
LastRow = Range(FirstColumn & "65536").End(xlUp).Row
For i = FirstRow To LastRow
If Range(FirstColumn & i).Value = "" Then
Range(FirstColumn & (i - 1)).Copy Range(FirstColumn & i)
End If
Next i
The approach in the script above is to make it exible, so it’ll let the user of the
sheet specify what column and row to start on. So now when you have a sheet
that looks like this:
You want to ll in the gaps in column G by lling in the blank cell with the same
formula as the cell above it, you can just run your macro. After you answer the
prompts for starting column and row, it’ll ll in all of the gaps in that column
without touching the existing data.
It’s essentially an auto lling the column while leaving existing data alone. This
isn’t something that’s easy to do by just dragging the mouse down the
column, but using either the menu-driven approach described above or the
macro approach outlined in this section, it’s possible.
5. Iterative Calculations Macro
An iterative calculation is a calculation performed based on the results of the

previous row.
For example, the next month’s company pro t may depend on the previous
month’s pro t. In that case, you need to incorporate the value from the
previous cell into the calculation that incorporates data from throughout the
sheet or the workbook.
Accomplishing this means you can’t just copy and paste the cell, but instead
perform the calculation based on the actual results inside the cell.
Let’s modify the previous macro to perform a new calculation based on the
results from the previous cell.
FirstColumn = InputBox("Please enter the column letter.")

FirstRow = InputBox("Please enter the first row number.")
LastRow = InputBox("Please enter the last row number.")
For i = FirstRow To LastRow

Range(FirstColumn & i).Value = 5000 + (Range(FirstColumn & (i
Next i
In this script, the user provides both the rst and the last row number. Since
there’s no data in the rest of the column, the script has no idea where to start.
Once the script is provided the range, it’ll then do an interactive calculation
using the previous value and will ll in the entire column with the new data.
Keep in mind that this is only an alternative approach to iterative calculations.

You can do the same thing by typing a formula directly into the next empty
cell, and include the previous cell in the formula. Then, when you auto- ll that
column, it’ll incorporate the previous value in the same way.
The bene t of using a macro is that if you wanted to you could add some
advanced logic to the interactive calculation, which you couldn’t do inside a
simple cell formula.
You can learn more about this in our article on automating your spreadsheets
with Excel macros.
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Autofilling Excel Columns Is a Breeze

As you can see, the approach you take when you’re auto lling columns can
really reduce your workload. This is especially true when you’re dealing with
massive spreadsheets with thousands of columns or rows.
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How to Create an Email Group

and Distribution List in Outlook
By Sandy Writtenhouse / February 19, 2019 19-02-2019 / 4 minutes
Sandy
Writtenhouse
369 articles
With her BS in Information

Email Facebook Pinterest Twitter Technology, Sandy worked for
many years in the IT industry as a
Sending emails to a group is more common in both our business and personal Project Manager, Department
lives. You may use groups for your project team at work and your immediate Manager, and PMO Lead. She then
family members at home. Creating an email group for a distribution list in decided to follow her dream and
now writes about technology full-
Microsoft Outlook can save you a lot of time.
time.
Once the group is set up, you can just pop it into the email and contact several
people with a single message. If you’ve never done this before, we’re here to
help. Here’s how to create a group in Outlook for both Windows and Mac.
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The Outlook application itself uses the terms Contact Group (Windows) and
Contact List (Mac) on its ribbon, in its menus, and in its support documents.
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So, as we move through the steps below, those are the phrases you’ll see most
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How to Create a Contact Group in Outlook on

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Open Outlook on your Windows computer and prepare to create your contact
group.
1 Select People from the bottom left of the Outlook window.

2 Click New Contact Group from the ribbon.
3 Give your group a name.
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You can also select New Items > More Items > Contact Group from Home tab
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To add contacts to your group, click Add Members from the ribbon. You can
add members from your Outlook contacts or address book, or you can create
new contacts.
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To add members from your Outlook contacts or address book, just double-
click their name in the popup window and it will be added to the Members
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When you’re done adding members to the group, click Save & Close from the
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Compose an Outlook Group Email on Windows

After you create your email group in Outlook, you have a couple of methods
for sending the members a message.
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In the Mail section of Outlook, you can send an email to that contact group you
created by doing the following.
1 Click New Email.
2 In the To eld, begin typing the name you gave to the contact group. Or,
you can click the To button and search for the group or select the group
name from the list.
3 When you see the group, select it and click OK.

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Compose an Email from the People Section
If you are in the People section of Outlook, click the contact group in your list.
Then, select the Email icon and a new email will open with the group
populated in the To eld for you.
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Compose an Outlook Group Email on Mac

After you create your email group in Outlook, you have a couple of ways to
send a message to them.
Compose an Email from the Mail Section
You’ll probably be in the Mail section of Outlook most often, so to send an

email to that distribution list you created, follow these steps.
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2 In the To eld, begin typing the name you assigned to the contact list.
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Compose an Email from the People Section
If you happen to be in the People section of Outlook, simply mouse over the
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Speed Things Up With Outlook Groups

It’s so easy to create a group in Outlook that if you email the exact same
people on a regular basis, it can really speed up your process.
For doing even more with your emails and inbox, check out these 10 tips for
getting better at Outlook.
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Are you using Outlook to its full potential? Become an Outlook
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and watch your productivity take off.
READ MORE
Explore more about: Contact Management, Email Tips, Microsoft Of ce 2019, Microsoft Of ce
365, Microsoft Of ce Tips, Microsoft Outlook.
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