Saturday, December 12, 2020

How does dragging to fill rows of a column work in MS Excel work?

 Microsoft Excel is built for productivity and dragging the mouse on an Excel sheet is one such trick that increases the productivity.

It is better that I explain with examples.

In this example, you just place a number in a cell.


Drag down as suggested.

Well, this is not interesting. It just COPIED the starting cell.  This is because, the default drag-down operation is COPY.

In the above if you choose the option Fill Series, it will fill the consecutive numbers starting from 1.

Another example here. I just entered the first date as 1/1/2021 and dragged down and this is what I get.



Here is another example.

Well, here is an example. In the first column I have the first name of a client, in the second I have the last name. In the third column, I use the CONCAT () function to fill the first name. I just have to do this for the first row. 


After evaluating the function, I just DRAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG! Voila, it fills the rest.


Instead of CONCAT (), the following also works.


Click here to see how 'flash fill' works.



















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