Excel has ways to add a list of dates by day, weekday, month or year either by the fill handle or the Series command.
Date Series with Fill Handle
You probably know about the Fill handle tool to fill the remaining cells.
Once highlighted, just hover your mouse in the bottom right corner and a plus sign will appear.
From there you can press your left mouse button down and drag the plus sign to select the cells you wish to autofill the data. It’ll even give you a preview of the date up to the cells you’ve selected.
Once you’ve released the mouse, the data will be inputted.
If you start with just one date, Excel will add following days.
Add a second date and Excel will use the gap between the two dates as the pattern. For this example, you can add each Monday.
Here the dates are in reverse order.
Date Series with Series Command
For more control over the series, go to Home | Editing | Fill | Series…. This is an extension of the Office Watch article More powerful Excel Autofill using Series
The series command box will appear, ensure that Date has been selected. From here you can specify the date unit:
- Day – applies to all days only.
- Weekday – will only apply to weekdays and omits weekends.
- Months – applies to all months only.
- Years – applies to all years only.
Specify your date unit, in our example we will apply to months only, then input your step value.
We have chosen the step value of 2. This means the following result will be from October to December to February, and so forth.
You can also input a stop value if needed.
Once you’re done, select OK to view the results.
As shown below, there is an increase in months by an increment of 2.
Weekdays only
Date Unit: Weekday will ignore weekends (Sat/Sun) when stepping through days. For example after Friday comes Tuesday (two weekdays).
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