Wonders of Excel: FILL HANDLE

As you probably know, Excel Fill Handle is located in the bottom right of any active cell or the bottom right cell of a selected range. It's a quite small black square visible in this snip:

Small it is, but it's very important to know how to utilize it, as it can be really helpful in eliminating lots of manual typing and saving time in working with data entry... and much more than this. It can be used for filling any range of cells with increments of any choice you want to select.

To utilize the Fill Handle, first you need to fill one or more cells with values (numbers or text, incl. dates and other custom lists). Hover your mouse pointer over the small square until it changes to a small black cross, then you have couple of choices: you can left-click, right-click or double-click (in some situations); click and drag the mouse in the direction you want to fill up the range of cells with series or custom lists that follow your pre-defined pattern.

TIPS for CLICKS: About using Mouse in Excel

Hello, mouse!

• Click means here: left button click 
• Fill Handle in Excel means: small black rectangle in the lower right corner of a cell/range selection.

The following table provides 30 helpful tips related to the use of mouse in the Excel app. It covers the most useful mouse 'shortcuts' enhancing user's skills and productivity, and explains how to use them. It's worth to utilize them in your work.

TIPS for CLICKS: Data entry

There are plenty of shortcuts provided in Excel program for data entry. Their purpose is twofold:

• to reduce data entry time, and
• to reduce data entry mistakes, to avoid errors

I don't think that average Excel user can remember or need to use all of them. However, several of those shortcuts are helpful for almost all users and are worth remembering.

Here is my very short list of shortcuts for data entry and basic editing.