CS 100 (Learn) — CS 100 (Web) — Module 04
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In this video, we are going to introduce the "autofill" feature of Excel and it is a little different than copying and pasting, although they are very similar in many ways.
[This] is a cool thing to show you: I am going to start writing the numbers 1 2 3 4 and let's just say for the sake of argument I want to go all the way up to 20. What I can do is highlight the region that I have already started, and then you will notice the bottom right hand corner there is a little tiny dot and when I hover over it with my mouse it turns into a plus [sign]. What I am going to do is start dragging that down, and Excel is going to [say:] "oh, I can see that pattern and automatically fill in the rest of the numbers".
You can do some more exotic patterns let's go up by twos 2 4 6 and [it can autofill] to 8 10 12...
I [start with] January February March and it will figure out [we are using] months.
You could even have things like "customer 1", "customer 2", and then Excel will automatically auto fill in the rest.
Let's revisit the very first example and how we would have done that before [we knew about] autofill.
What we probably would have done is entered 1 [in cell D2] and then the next cell we would have said take the cell above, [so] in D3 I am going to say I am going to be =D2+1 and then I could copy (Ctrl+C) that and then I am going to [highlight] the range that I want that cell to be copied to, and paste (Ctrl+V).
It looks the same but there is a slight difference here so if you go back to the first example, the values were the contents of the cells 1 2 3 4 5. The differences is, we have 1 and then =D2+1 and then =D3+1 and =D4+1. The contents of the cell are slightly different: here we are actually copying a formula down.
Of course, Excel will also be able to do this with autofill as well. If I enter 1 [in F2] and then I [enter in F3] =F2+1, and then I just autofill [from F3].
[If Excel] can't detect a pattern, it will just copy and paste so when I drag it down [from F3] it accomplishes the exact same thing.
So the way autofill works in general is:
If there is no observable pattern... for example, red blue yellow, and I autofill, it can't detect a pattern so it will just copy and paste.