Excel speedfill autofill 2007 2010 2013 2016 tutorial for beginners

okay in this video we're going to talk about how to do uh something that's called a speed fill or some people call it an autofill and it's going to give you a quicker way to type in your spreadsheet on this sheet over here uh we actually typed in the month names manually uh that was in a different lesson but now I'm going to show you a better way I'm going to go over to sheet three and let's say I want to start right over here uh I'm going to type in January and I'll hit the enter key now to do a speed fill I'm going to click on that cell and then I'm going to go ahead and go to the bottom right hand corner of that cell and you get the black cross the black cross here is called the speed fill or the auto fill what you're going to do is you're going to drag the black cross I'm going to hold down my left Mouse button and drag it over and notice how the month names appear just like that so that's the exact purpose of the speed fill is to help you spill uh fill in your spreadsheet a little bit quicker watch again I'm going to undo that going to type in the first of your series uh you're going to get the black cross in the bottom right hand corner and you're going to drag it over as far as you want to go now you can also drag it down watch I'm going to pick on January and Dr drag it down and that works also now if we had kept on go until December I'll even go a little bit further then you can see it starts again at January just like the regular months actually I'm going to uh erase all of those I just wanted to show that we could drag it down and uh let me delete that to delete that uh I can just hit my delete key on my keyboard of course now we can also drag it up I'm going to use January over here and if I get the black cross and drag it up notice then it goes backwards it goes January December November but it still works also if I drag it to the left I'm going to pick it up and drag it to the left notice how it goes backward but it still works so if you drag it to the right or if you drag it down it's going to go forward in progression if you drag it uh up or to the left it's going to go uh backward in progression now I'm going to get rid of these couple cells uh those are just examples the speed fill also works with uh uh day names so I'm going to type in Monday and the same kind of thing is going to occur I'm going to click on that and use the um the black cross to drag that over and you can see I have Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and so on and then it starts at Monday again now notice how this one is too short so what you would do is you're going to go over it between E and F you get the black cross and then you just drag that over uh or another way to make a column bigger is I can drag that but I can doubleclick on the black cross and then that makes it just as long as it needs to be as we can see so the speed fill works with a month names it works with days of the week it also works with numbers uh let's type in the number one and uh I want to click on that cell I'm going to go to the bottom right hand corner and get the black cross and drag it over now notice what happened with the numbers that actually made them all one well that's not exactly what I wanted to do so if you notice whenever you do a speed fill you get this little window over here you're going to click on that you click on the pull down and then instead of a copy you're going to do a fill I'm going to pick on fill and then notice what it did then it says 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 uh so all I did was uh let's undo that I start at the one I want to drag it over now if it does a copy rather than a fill you're going to click on this little pull down and then make it a fill instead or if it made it a fill and you want it to make a copy we can do it that way as well all right now you can see it has 1 2 3 4 5 6 seven eight uh let's say you want to do every other number like let's say 1357 in this case I want you type when you want something that's different than sequential you type in the first two of your series see how I typed in one and three you're going to highlight both of those cells you're going to get to the um the black cross and then you'll drag it over notice how Excel this time is smart enough to figure out that you want to do every other number so when you want something that's different than sequential you're going to type in the first two of your series you highlight both cells and then you do the speed fill and Excel usually is smaller than to figure out what you're trying to do let's try that one again let's say I want to go 5 10 15 20 I want to type in five now I just have the tab key so I can go over to next cell to the right I'm going to hit type in 10 I'm going to highlight both of those cells get the black cross and then drag it over notice now I have 5 10 15 20 okay let's try it with uh dates now so uh let's say I want to start with today's date and move uh forward from there by the way here's a keyboard shortcut for today's date on my keyboard I'm going to use control semicolon all right control semicolon it's going to give you today's date now if you try that on your computer and it it comes up with a different date than today's date it means that your system clock is not set properly but usually that's going to come up with today's date when we do control semic calling you hold down control and then do semic calling at the same time uh now let's see how the speed fill is going to work with date so I'm going to get the black cross and drag it over actually in this case we see a lot of those pound signs anytime that you see the pound signs in Excel it means that you have to make that cell bigger so what I'm going to do is um I'm going to go up between d and e and get a black cross and then I I'm just going to double click on that and you can see now uh it's bigger and the pound signs are no longer there we can do this one by one but let's say I needed to change all of these at the same time what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the letter F and then drag it over to include all of those columns now I'm going to go between column H and column I or I can go between any two columns there and then get the black cross and then double click and then notice how they they all um now show the dates rather than the pound signs so anytime that you see the pound signs you just want to make that column bigger but we can also make more than one column bigger at the same time but let's see the speed fill again I'm going to click here I'm going to get the black cross in the bottom right hand corner and then drag it over and then you can see it gives us the next sequential dates uh now it I'm actually recording this on a Thursday and this is a Thursday this is a Friday this is a Saturday and a Sunday what if I just wanted to show the week days and and not the weekend days because maybe we're doing this for uh a business and you know you wouldn't want to include the weekends so what you do is uh you're going to use this little box again you're going to click on that pull down and then uh you can see I can say fill week days that only shows up when you're using a date so let's do fill week days and look at this now it goes from uh October 1st to October 4th it skipped right over the weekend uh here's a pound sign again I'm going to make that bigger and even here went from October 8th to October 11th it skipped right over the weekend so that's a a nice feature as well what if you wanted your spreadsheet to reflect every Friday's day date so that's another instance where I would um type in the first two so uh in this case this week the Friday is on October 1st 2010 then I want to type in next Friday's date I'm going to type in October uh 8th 2010 now I'm going to highlight both of those cells I'm going to get the black cross and then drag it over uh we see some of those pound signs this case I'm just going to make those bigger individually by double clicking on that black cross at the top of the column but notice what it gave us it gave us each Friday after that so um that's another example of when you when you use the first two in the series Excel is smart enough to figure out what we're trying to do so now we have every Friday after that what if I want the last uh day of each month because some companies pay their commission maybe monthly so let's say and you want to set up the spreadsheet like that so uh let's say for uh for September it's going to be 9:30 and then again I'm going to type in the last day of October which would be 1031 I going to highlight both of those cells I'm going to get the uh the black cross and then drag it over and now if you notice I have the last day of each month after that so the speed fill is just uh really an outstanding way to quickly fill in your spreadsheet it works with uh month names it works with uh day names numbers if you wanted something that's different than sequential you type in the first two and then and then uh you highlight both of those and do your speed fill like in these couple examples it works with dates and then even if you wanted U uh different dates like here we have every Friday you type in the first two of your series you highlight those you get the black cross and then you drag it over and then we have every Friday after that so that's how can quickly fill in your spreadsheet with um the speed fill type of operation