SMITH-HODGE CPAs

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.  Romans 8:28

I recently received this email message from Candy, my sister in-law:

Mr. Excel,

Might you assist in auto-populating Column A for me, please, with numerals for the roster of names?

I just know you’ll make it faster for me than my entering 1300 individually. lol

I need this for work. Thanks a bunch!

Candy

Candy was referring to Column A from the Excel spreadsheet image has shown below. Candy had manually punched into each of cells A2 through A6 the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 respectively. She was tasked with continuing the number sequence for the next 1300 rows — a daunting task indeed!

Candy figured there had to be a better way (an automated way) to populate the next 1300 rows. She knew that she would never get to bed that night if she continued to manually insert each cell with its appropriate number.  And that’s when she turned to me for help.

I simply clicked on cell A2. And, I then held the shift-key down and clicked on cell A6. This action highlighted the cell range A2-A6. I double-clicked on the fill-handle. The fill-handle is the green square in in the lower-right corner of cell A6 (the red arrow is pointing to it).

Presto! Excel auto-filled every cell from cell A7 to A1306 with its appropriate sequential number as based on the number pattern that Candy started. And, this action only took a couple of seconds.

Excel knew to stop the auto-fill in cell A1306 (see the image below). Excel only fills the cells in a column as based on the longest adjacent column of data on the spreadsheet. That was cell B1306 in this instance. Cell B1306 contained the ending name in the list of names from column B.