How to use Autofill in MS Excel 2016?

It is a very tedious job to fill the data in a spreadsheet manually. Excel provides a feature of Autofill that fills cells with the extended series that follow the pattern of the initially selected cell. Autofill feature fastens your work and saves your time. Your initial selection can be a number series , time, weekdays, months, years, date or even it can be any data that forms some pattern. So let us learn How to use Autofill in Ms Excel 2016?

Steps to use Autofill in MS Excel 2016:

Step 1: Before proceeding further, you must be aware of enabling or disabling the feature of autofill in MS Excel 2016. For that first, you have to open a document in MS Excel 2016. Go to the File and click on the Options tab present on the left side of the screen.

Step 2: A pop-up dialog box Excel Options will get opened on your screen. You will find the Advanced Tab on the left column of the box click on Advanced tab.

Step 3: In Advanced tab under Editing Options search for the checkbox “Enable fill handle and cell drag and drop“. Click on that check box and then click OK. It will enable the autofill feature in MS Excel 2016.

Step 4: Come back to the Home tab. Now, we will learn how to use the autofill feature of Excel. For demonstration purpose, I wrote a date 2/16/2016 in the MM-DD-YYYY pattern in a cell of a spreadsheet. Using mouse pointer select the cell containing the date. Now observe carefully you will find a small box at the bottom right corner of the selected cell. Click and drag that small box till you want the number of cells to get autofill and leave the cursor when the number of cells you want to autofill is reached.

Step 5: The cells you selected are now autofilled. Now if you want some changes in the entries of the cells. Click on Auto Fill Options button that appears on the right corner of the selected cells.

Step 6: You will find several options like Copy Cells, Fill Series, and Fill Formating Only, Fill Without Formatting, Fill Days, Fill Weekdays, Fill Months, Fill Years and Flash Fill.

Copy Cells option copies all the selected cells with the same value.

Fill Series option fills all the selected cells with the series in ascending order.
Fill Formatting Only option fills the selected with some format.
Fill Without Formatting option fills without any format.
Fill Days will change the days of the date and arrange it ascending order/
Fill Weekday option will omit Saturday’s Sundays and prints the rest on the selected cells in ascending order.
Fill Months option will change the months of the date and arrange it in ascending order.
Fill Years Option will change the year in all the dates and arrange them in ascending order.

For demonstration purpose, I selected Fill Months option, and you can see in the image below that it changed only the month values and arranged them in ascending order.

Hope you find the article useful. Keep reading.