Selecting, copying, and the fill handle that saves you time
You can type into cells now, you can fix a typo without panicking, and autosave is on so nothing is getting eaten. Good. Now let us talk about not retyping things, because retyping things is where mistakes sneak in.
If you are typing the same number or the same label into six different cells by hand, you have already made a future mistake. You just have not met it yet. Maybe you mistype one of the six. Maybe you update five and forget the sixth. Selecting and copying properly is how you avoid that whole mess.
Selecting more than one cell
Click a cell, then drag to the next ones over. That is a selection. You will see them highlight, usually with a little color change, and the first cell you clicked stays a slightly different shade, because that is the "active" one.
You can also do this without dragging. Click one cell, hold Shift, click another cell further down or across, and everything in between gets selected. This is the one I actually prefer, because dragging on a laptop trackpad makes me sloppy, and I end up one row short or one row long about half the time.
If you want to select a whole column, click the letter at the top. Whole row, click the number on the left. Simple, but people do not try it for weeks, because nobody tells them.
Copy and paste, the boring but important part
Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste. On a Mac it is Command instead of Ctrl. I will absolutely say Ctrl when I mean Command at some point today, so if that happens, just mentally swap it. I have given up apologizing for it every single time.
Copy one cell, click somewhere else, paste. Copy a whole range, click the top-left cell of where you want it to land, paste. The whole range drops in starting from there. You do not have to select the exact same shape on the other end, just the starting corner.
The fill handle, which is the actual point of this lesson
Click a cell. Look at the bottom right corner. There is a tiny square there, easy to miss the first few times. That is the fill handle.
Click and hold that tiny square, then drag down or across, and it copies the cell into everything you drag over. If it is a plain number or word, it just repeats it. If it is something like "Monday," or a date, or the number 1 followed by 2 in the next cell, it is smart enough to notice the pattern and keep counting for you. Type 1 in one cell, 2 in the next, select both, grab the fill handle, drag down, and it will keep going 3, 4, 5 on its own.
That trick alone is worth the whole lesson. I use it constantly for month labels, week numbers, that sort of thing.
One caution here, and I mean it: double-click that little square instead of dragging, and it will try to auto-fill down as far as your data next to it goes. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. Sometimes it goes much further than you expected and fills three hundred rows, because there was a stray number way down at row 300 you had forgotten about. Just glance at what actually happened afterward. Undo is Ctrl+Z, and it is free. Use it.
Where this actually matters at home
Say you are building out a simple monthly tracker, six categories, twelve months. You do not need to type "Groceries" twelve times across the top or down the side. Type it once, select it, drag the fill handle across, done. Same with your month labels, same with row numbers if you are using them.
And speaking of six categories, not forty, that is still my opinion from a couple of lessons back, and I am sticking with it. Five or six categories you will actually maintain beats twenty precise ones you will abandon by February. Keep the sheet simple enough that filling it in does not feel like a chore, because a chore is the thing you stop doing.
A word on autosave, and why I keep bringing it up
I bring up autosave a great deal because of one particular afternoon. I was mid-formula, deep in it, Dawson was three at the time and got hold of a cup of apple juice that had no business anywhere near my laptop. It went straight into the keyboard. I lost about twenty minutes of work because autosave was off that day, do not ask me why, and I just sat there a second, doing the math on how annoyed I was.
I turned autosave on that same afternoon, and it has never been off since. Selecting and dragging and filling is fast and satisfying, right up until you lose it, so let the computer save behind you while you work. You should not have to think about it at all, and if you have small children, or a spill-prone pet, or just clumsy hands like mine, you especially should not have to think about it.
Before next time
Open your tracker, or start a small one if you have not yet, and practice filling a row of month labels or numbers with the fill handle instead of typing them out. See if you can get the drag-and-count trick to work on the first try. Mine took a couple of tries the first time too.
- C