Shown is starting to feel a lot more confident about his Excel skills, and that's just as well because he's been given his first assignment. The bus has asked him to complete the help desk roster for the next two weeks, one of the tools that can help a lot with this is the fill handle. The fill handle is located at the bottom right-hand corner of a cell. When you hover over it, you should get a small black cross. At its simplest, the fill handle allows us to quickly copy. Let's have a look, so I'm going to click and drag down to row 17, and release, and it has copied my days for me. The fill handle can do some slightly clever things there was well. So, I'm going to click on to B4 where I've got my record number, and I actually want these to go R1001, R1002, let's see what happens when I drag my fill handle. Now, what has happened here is the fill handle's given us what's called a series, where you have a combination of text and numbers, it automatically adds one to the numbers, well, that is interesting. Let's see what happens with our dates. So, I'm going to click on the first of the fifth, this time however instead of dragging, I'm going to try a shortcut, I'm going to double-click my fill handle. So, two quick licks, how good was that? Again, we've got that series with adding one to each date, which is perfect. Let's see what happens with days of the week. So, I've clicked on Monday, and again going to come to my fill handle, double-click. Well, that is clever, and that will work with days of the week all months of the year. Now, I've done each of those individually, so that you can see how they work, but to show you how quick this could have been, I'm going to undo those last three changes, I'm going to select all three of these, and then double-click my fill handle, and you can see you don't even have to do them one at a time. Excellent. Now, each of my help desk shifts is eight hours. So, really I just want to copy that number eight down. Let's see what happens when we double-click the fill handle, and there we go, so that's interesting. With dates, we get a series, but with numbers, we automatically get a copy. Now, I need to number my shifts for the next two weeks, but I know that when I double-click my one, I'm just going to get a series of ones. However, Excel does actually give you options. Whenever you use the fill handle, you should see a little icon come up at the bottom, and if you hover over it you'll see it's called Auto Fill Options. I'm going to click on the drop down arrow, and you'll see it has done a copy, but you do have the option to do a fill series. Well, that's brilliant, I'm going to click on that and they you go. Now, let's see what would happen with our options for our date. So, I'm going to come back to date here, double-click, come and have a look at my options, and this time it is chosen fill series, but I could choose a copy. So, if you need to do that, you have that but dates as well or you could do something quite fun, so I could do fill weekdays or fill months, but I'd like to get back to my fill series. So, quite a rich selection of options, the fill handle also allows you to do simple patterns. So, for example, my cumulative hours, total hours on help desk is going to go up in eights. If I just copy the 16, that's not going to work, but if I select both the eight and, so I tell Excel there's a pattern and then double-click, there we go, counting in eights, and Excel could do this for quite a range of fairly straightforward patterns. Let's look at a slightly more complex one. So, I have my five help desk staff here, I'm going to select all of them, and again double-click, and it has copied the whole group down. Now, one really exciting feature that was added in 2013; so this will only be available to 2013 and '16 users, is something called flash fill, which is an even more sophisticated pattern matcher. If you have a look here, I have Rajesh's address, which is made up of his first name, a dot, his surname, and then the company name. Now, if I come and copy that down, it just copies it, but if I come to my Auto Fill Options, you'll see there's an option to do flash fill, and when I click on that, it spots the pattern, and automatically creates addresses for all my staff. Wasn't that quick? Have a go at using the fill handle yourself.