Selecting, copying, and the fill handle that saves you time
Okay sooo. You can type into cells now, you can fix a typo without panicking, and autosave is on so nothing's getting eaten. Good. Now let's talk about not retyping things, because retyping things is where mistakes sneak in.
Here's the thing. If you're typing the same number or the same label into six different cells by hand, you've already made a future mistake. You just haven't met it yet. Maybe you fat-finger 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's a selection. You'll see them highlight, usually with a little color change, and the first cell you clicked stays a slightly different shade because that's 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 don't 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's 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've 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 don't 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's a tiny square there, easy to miss the first few times. That's 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's a plain number or word, it just repeats it. If it's something like "Monday," or a date, or the number 1 followed by 2 in the next cell, it's 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'll 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, genuinely: double-click that little square instead of dragging, and it'll try to auto-fill down as far as your data next to it goes. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. Sometimes it goes way further than you expected and fills three hundred rows because there was a stray number way down at row 300 you forgot about. Just glance at what actually happened after. Undo is Ctrl+Z and it's free, use it.
Where this actually matters at home
Say you're 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're using them.
And speaking of six categories, not forty, that's still my opinion from a couple lessons back and I'm sticking with it. Five or six categories you'll actually maintain beats twenty precise ones you'll abandon by February. Keep the sheet simple enough that filling it in doesn't feel like a chore, because a chore is the thing you stop doing.
Quick real talk about autosave and why I still bring it up
Not gonna lie, I bring up autosave a lot because of one specific 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 being anywhere near my laptop. It went straight into the keyboard. I lost about twenty minutes of work because autosave was off that day, don't ask me why, and I just sat there for 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 shouldn't have to think about it at all, and if you've got small kids or a spill-prone pet or just clumsy hands like mine, you especially shouldn't have to think about it.
Before next time
Open your tracker, or start a small one if you haven't 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