Module 4.8b - Autofill
0:00 - in this video we're going to introduce the autofill feature of excel and it's a
0:05 - little different than copying and pasting although they are very similar
0:08 - in many ways
0:09 - so here's a cool thing to show you i'm going to start writing the numbers 1 2 3
0:14 - 4 and let's just say for the sake of argument
0:17 - I want to go all the way up to 20 well what i can do is i can highlight the
0:23 - region that I've already started and then you've noticed the bottom right
0:26 - hand corner there's a little tiny . and when i hover over it with my mouth it
0:30 - turns into a plus
0:32 - and what I'm going to do is start dragging that down and excel is going to
0:35 - know
0:36 - oh I can see that pattern and automatically fill in the rest of the
0:39 - numbers you can do some more exotic patterns
0:42 - let's go up by tues - 46 and so if i drag down to 46
0:50 - and now realizes we go up by tues or i should say january-february march and
0:58 - i'll figure out
0:59 - oh you must be doing the months
1:04 - and you can even have
1:05 - it's like customer one like this column a little wider customer one customer to
1:12 - and then Excel will automatically auto fill in the rest right there
1:20 - let's revisit the very first example and how he would have done that before the
1:25 - days of auto fill
1:26 - well we probably would have done has entered one and then the next I'll we
1:29 - would have said take the cell above me
1:31 - so in this case in d3 i'm going to say i'm going to be d 2 plus 1 and then I
1:38 - could copy
1:39 - I'm hitting ctrl c
1:42 - i'm going to copy that and then i'm gonna show the range that I want that
1:47 - sell to be copied to and hit control V for paste the same
1:53 - it looks the same but there is a slight difference here so if you go back to the
1:57 - first one
1:58 - the actual values where the contents of the cell one two three four five
2:03 - the differences over here we have one and then this is d 2 plus 1 and then
2:08 - this is d 3 + 1 + d 4 + 1 so the contents of the cell are slightly
2:13 - different
2:14 - here we are actually copy a formula down of course
2:18 - excel will also be able to do this with auto feel as well if i enter one and
2:22 - then I say equals that plus 1 and then I just auto fill this cell if you can't
2:29 - detect a pattern it will just copy paste
2:32 - so when I drag it down there it is accomplished the exact same thing
2:36 - so the way autofill works in general is if it can detect a pattern with values
2:41 - it will extend those values if it cannot detect a pattern it will do the same as
2:45 - copying and pasting
2:47 - so if there is no observable pattern
2:50 - say for example I say red blue yellow and then i say go ahead and autofill
2:59 - this it can't detect a pattern
3:02 - so just copy and paste