The Dynamic Sector Newsletter

Office Tips & Tricks

Excel Tips from Microsoft Guru
These tips were gleaned from a very useful Microsoft help site (see here) and will work for Excel 2003 or 2007.

Fill handle
Excel can auto-fill cells in eerily smart ways. Instead of manually typing a sequence in cells, you can simply type the first few values of the sequence and drag the fill handle to auto-fill the rest of the cells. The fill handle is the little black square at the lower right corner of a selected cell's border. Drag it to automatically fill adjacent cells.

If you drag the fill handle with only one cell selected, it will repeat that cell's value into adjacent cells. However, if you drag the fill handle with multiple cells selected, Excel is smart enough to figure out the series. For instance, in the following example, Excel will fill subsequent cells with the increasing series of odd numbers. This even works for other types of series, like dates and percentages.

Moving and copying cells by dragging selection borders
Quite possibly the most useful yet completely undiscoverable feature in Excel is the ability to move and copy cells by dragging selection borders.

For instance, to move row four between rows one and two, select row four and drag the selection border while holding down the Shift key in order to insert it in its new position. If you drag the border without holding down the Shift key, the selected cells will instead replace the cells you drop them on. Conversely, if you hold down CTRL while dragging a selection border, the selected cells are copied to their new location.

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