Fast Fill Sequential lists or rows in Excel

There’s a fast way to Fill cells with sequential data into a list or rows without dragging the mouse. The Series command can insert all sorts of lists for dates, weekdays and numbers.

It’s very handy for users that need to fill a large number of cells. Those that use the fill command within the ribbon will be able to enter sequential data in large worksheets more efficiently and be more productive.

Example

Let’s say you need to create a list of each date for 2022. Most users would start off with Saturday, 1 January 2022 and use their mouse to drag down the list from there.

However, this way is tedious and time-consuming, dragging down 365 rows for each date.

All you need to do is fill in the first cell with the value. In our example, we have put Saturday, 1 January 2022. Once you have done that, select that cell, and all remaining cells that you will need to fill. In this case, we have just simply highlighted the entire Column A.

Once the column has been highlighted, there is an easy shortcut you can use via the ribbon Home | Editing | Fill | Series

Or press Alt, then H, F, I, S on your keyboard to bring up the Series box.

The series will default to Rows. Simply change this to columns and add in your stop value, in our case the end of the year.

Make sure type is set to Date, and Date unit is set to Day.

Press OK, and your dates will fill in the column up until the stop value.

Add a Step value to skip a number of days. Use 7 as the step value to insert a weekly date. Or skip 28 days for some four-weekly event.

Weekdays only

Choose ‘Weekdays’ to only skip working days. For example, using Step value 4 days with weekdays will not count Saturday or Sunday as days to skip.

For example starting on Wednesday, skip 4 weekdays only shows the following Tuesday as the next date (Wed, Thurs, Fri and Mon are skipped).

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