Autofill your life....well, at least your spreadsheets anyway

Our tip this week is all about how to use the 'Autofill' function. This little gem can seriously save you hours upon hours of mundane and mindless speadsheet input.
The best way to show you is through example, so imagine you are doing your annual household budget.

First off, you want to make a list of annual expenses you need to budget for. So you can manually type 1 to 20 in a line going down your spreadsheet. Or, you can type a 1 into Cell A3, a 2 into Cell A4, and then highlight both cells until they are surrounded by a thick dark line, like so:

Hover your mouse over the bottom right hand corner of the highlighted cells, and a little cross will appear. Drag that down for as many rows as you need, and hey presto, you have a list from 1 to 20, or 3064, depending on how many expenses you have.

That was the easy bit. Now you think of all your expenses that you have over the year, and type the descriptions into column B, and the annual cost into column C.

To calculate how much you will spend, or need to save every month, you need to divide these annuals costs by 12. Do this in column D, but again, you won't need to do it in each cell. Autofill steps in to help again.

Type the formula =C3/12 into cell D3. Hover your mouse over the cell D3 until it is highlighted again, and the cross appears. Double click on the cross, and your formula miraculously appears down to the bottom of your list. No need to even drag it down, but you can if you would like to.

As you can imagine, when you have 10 052 lines of data, using that double click function can save you hours of mental tedium!

Some other points on Autofill:

• You can drag across as well as down
• You can create all sorts of number lists, not just consecutive numbers. For example, if you only want even numbers, type 2, then 4 into the next cell, drag down and you get an even numbered list.
• When you drag down, you will notice a little box on the bottom right hand corner once you've completed the drag down. Click on this, and it gives you a pop up menu with even more choices for your Autofill pleasure.
• You can also use Autofill for dates, months and years. However, that can get a bit more complicated, so we will cover that next week.

Hope you found this useful. Again, feel free to suggest topics you would like me to cover.

Happy spreadsheeting!