I'm going to be talking some exciting features in Excel, known as Auto Fill and Fill Series in this screencast, that will help you with making you much more efficient in Microsoft Excel. Excel is quite smart, there's something known as AutoFill. So let me just put in something that's quite common by putting in the month here. Now, if you click in that cell and you go down here to the lower right, you see that that empty bigger plus sign goes into this smaller solid plus sign, that's known as the Fill handle. So if I take that and I left-click and I drag, you see that below here, it's recognizing that this is a commonly filled series. Commonly used series, the months and it says February and I do March, April, and so on. So, if you release the left Mouse button, then it puts those months into those cells. So that's know as AutoFill, you can do the same thing going down. So if I had January, you can use the fill handle on the lower right and you can drag and it recognizes that you would like to AutoFill that series. We can also do this with some other things. Let's just put in Monday, so it recognizes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and so on. By the way, if you only have one of those, let's just say you have Wednesday, you can always go backwards. So I can go to the left and it fills in Monday and Tuesday. It does this also with abbreviations, so if I do Mon and we go over, it's going to fill that series in. So, this is quite useful, you don't have to manually type in all of those days of the week. What about numbers, so if I put in a 1 and I want to fill this 1, 2, 3, and so on. So I'm going to click on that 1, go down to the fill handle and we're going to drag down. Now unfortunately, there are a lot of things in Excel where it doesn't immediately recognize that as AutoFill series, but for some things you can press the Ctrl button while you're holding that fill handle down. So, I'm going to press the control button and then when you go back and forth. And the Ctrl button kind of forces it into doing an AutoFill, especially on things that are commonly filled in. If you're curious what series are typically available for AutoFill, you can always go up here to File > Options and then in the Advanced area over here. If you scroll down to General, which is kind of near the bottom and you go to Edit Custom Lists, this is what is available as AutoFill list. In a minute, I'll talk about how you can make Custom Lists. So I'm going to go ahead and Cancel and click Cancel again. Sometimes it'll recognize, it'll be smart. So, if I put in Student 1, then if I drag down, it's recognizing. Then I want to put in a series and it'll automatically add that. So it's kind of interesting that it won't do that for just 1, but it will do that for Student 1. I'm going to go ahead and clear this real quick and let's take a look at some other types of series. If you wanted to skip 2, if you want to to skip, you can always highlight those and then you can drag the fill handle down and it's going to only put in the odd numbers. So if you specify the first two of a list and then you can drag that down, that will create a custom series. You can do the same thing with days. So Monday, maybe you want to skip every two days, you can do Monday, Wednesday and it'll just go through and skip, so, it's putting every other day there. Now sometimes, my classes are only taught on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so I could type in Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I want to make that repeating. One thing you can do is, you can just do Ctrl + Copy and you can Paste. But another thing that you can do is you can select those three and then you can drag down, but after you drag down there's this little AutoFill options box that pops up and we want to Copy Cells. So it's going to start with those three. So now it's just going to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and if you want you can select the entire list. And then you can keep going and it's just going to repeat Monday, Wednesday, Friday throughout the entire semester. Another example, maybe you wanted to just have a list of numbers that are separated by 0.5. If you have a increment like 0.5 and you want to make that repeating. So you want to go up to 1.5, 2, 2.5 and so on, you just highlight the first two of that list, as long as it's a constant increment, you go down to the fill handle and then you can fill in. Another way to do this, is known as Fill Series. So maybe, we want to start at 10 and we want to go down and we want to increase by 10 every time. Another way to do this is just to start with your first value, go up here to the Home tab. And if you go into Editing there's a little Fill, so we can click on Fill, we want to make a series. We want this to be in a column, not a row, you can make it in a row if you like, but I'm going to show this with columns. Our Step value is going to be 10, and we're going to make a series until we're at 100 and then I can click OK. That's not quite as fast as putting 10 and 20, highlighting those two and just quickly dragging down to 100. But sometimes if you have a really big list, the Fill Series might be a little more efficient. You can also create Fill Series that our growth trends. So, maybe we want to double, we want to double every time, so it'll go 1, 2, 4, 8, and so on. You can click over here in Editing > Fill. It's going to be a series, now this is going to be also in a column, it's not linear, but it's a growth series. We're going to step it by a factor of 2, that means we're multiplying by 2 every time. And maybe, we want to go up to something like a 128. So we're doubling 1, 2, 4, 8, and so on. So there's a couple different options in that Fill Series. Finally, I wanted to show you how you can make your own Custom Lists. So, on a Spreadsheet if you want to work along with me in a file called Dwarves, the Seven Dwarfs are there. So go ahead and open that up and I'm going to go ahead and click on File > Options. And I'm going to go to Advanced, like I showed earlier. I'm going to scroll down to General and I'm going to do Edit Custom Lists. Now we can create a New List. So make sure new list is selected and I'm going to click down here in the Import lists from cells. I'm just going to highlight my seven dwarfs over there. I'm going to click Import and you see that it is imported that as a list. Now I can click OK, OK once again. And I can even close this file because it's permanently imported those, I can close this file and I can go back to just any old spreadsheet and maybe every day you're working with these dwarves. So you can type in Doc, you can click on that and then you can do the Fill Series and it's going to recognize that and there's your seven dwarfs. So you can customize your list, if at any point in time you decide that you don't want that list anymore, you can go down to File > Options > Advanced and you can go back to the Edit Custom Lists down here. And you can just Delete and it'll ask you if you would like to do that, click OK and click OK once again. So hopefully, you learned quite a bit about AutoFill and Fill Series and making your own custom AutoFill lists in this screencast.
