Customizing Microsoft Excel’s AutoFill Function
Excel’s AutoFill facility relies on the program’s ability to recognize patterns in the values that you enter. For example, say you type “Week 1” in a cell; you can have the program automatically enter “Week 2”, “Week 3”, etc. by dragging the AutoFill handle. This is situated in the bottom right of the cell. When the cursor moves over it, the cursor changes appearance to a plus sign (+). At this point you simply click, hold, drag in any direction and Excel will pick up the pattern and reproduce it to create automatic data entries.
Each time you use the AutoFill handle Excel displays the AutoFill Options drop down menu just below the last cell which has been automatically created. If the program has not entered the data you wanted it to, just choose one of the entries in the AutoFill Options to tell it what you wanted it to do. For example, if you choose Copy Cells, Excel will generate an exact copy of what was in the original cell.
Excel is also capable of automatically entering an arbitrary series of data using a feature called Custom Lists. There are certain lists built into Excel, for example, the months of the year. To use the AutoFill feature, you need to enter the first value in the list, for example, “January” or “Jan”. Next, you drag the AutoFill handle (located in the bottom right of the cell) in any direction to have Excel automatically enter the rest of the custom list.
In addition to Excel’s built-in lists, you can also create your own custom lists. For example, let’s say we work for a company that has branches in several towns. We would almost certainly need to list these towns quite frequently in our spreadsheets. We could save ourselves a fair amount of time by setting up the towns as a custom list.
To do this, simply select cells in one of your worksheets that contain the information. Next, click on the Office button and choose Excel options. Click on “Edit Custom Lists” in the “Popular” category. Excel displays the contents of the cells that we highlighted. To convert the selected data into a custom list, we simply click on the “Import” button.
This custom list can now be used in any of our worksheets, not just the sheet that contained the original information. Whenever we need out list, we simply type the first value. We then use the AutoFill handle to generate the remaining entries. When using AutoFill, you can drag in any direction and you don’t have to start with the first element in the custom list.
Custom lists can also be entered directly in the “Custom Lists” dialog box. To do this, click on the “List Entries” button and type the list separating entries with a carriage return. After entering the list, click on the Add button to make it permanent.
To delete an unwanted custom list, just click on it and press the “Delete” button. Excel checks that you want to delete the list and when you click “OK”, the custom list is removed.
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