AutoFill without Dragging (Excel 97)

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Someone asked me a question today and I have no idea what to answer. I showed them how to use the fill handle to auto fill the word Yes down a column. As the column was quite large and they are not that good at dragging with the mouse, they wanted to know if there was a way to fill cells E4:E40 with the word Yes without dragging the fill handle. Hope that makes sense. Any ideas would be appreciated.

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There are a couple of ways.

1- If a column next to E has something in rows 4:40, then you can type “Yes” in E4 and double click the fill handle. Yes will be filled down as far as the data goes in D or F.

2- You can type “Yes” in cell E4. Then select cell E4. Then scroll down to cell E40 and hold down Shift and click on cell E40. That should select cells E4:E40. Now, in the Edit menu click on Fill and then in the pop up menu click on Down. That should fill Yes from E4 to E40.

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If there is data in the column to the immediate left, double-clicking the fill handle will fille down as far as there is continuous data in the left column.

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Perfect, thanks! Didn’t know about the double-click on the fill handle. That will work great.

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sometimes, too, it’s helpful to start highlighting from the bottom of the range and highlight up. I’m not sure what you meant by “they’re not that good at dragging with the mouse”, but maybe that would help them in other situations.

Also, if they highlight the range they want to fill and then type in their data and confirm with , it will fill all the cells with the data they typed in, just as one other alternative…

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Oh I like that Ctrl Enter too. That is another great tip. Thanks!

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Finally, highlighting the cells and pressing Ctrl+D will fill E4 down as far as you want to go. (BTW Highlighting E4 out to say AC4 and pressing Ctrl+R will autofill horizontally.) [AFAIK there are still no Keyboard Shortcuts for filling Up or for filling from Right to left.] HTH

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