Excel is a tool many use everyday and few are really ever taught how. Most often we are using Excel to track data by categories or similar criteria. We end up having to do a bunch of copy and pasting or, even worse, re-typing! Here are a few simple ways to fill in your sheet and save you typing or copy/paste time.

Fill Down or Fill In <ctrl d> or <cmd d>:

This first method is a simple one for those who love keyboard shortcuts. Simply highlight the word you want and the rows you want to place it in and hit <ctrl> & <d> and it will fill in the cells (it is <cmd> & <d> for Mac):

This works if you skip cells too. Do this by choosing the word or number you want and then hold down <ctrl> and select all the cells you want this information in. Then once again hit <ctrl> & <d> and it will fill in the cells:

Fill Down: Another method is to drag the word down. By clicking the box in the corner of the cell and dragging it down to where you the data to go.

Or you could simply double click on the box in the corner and it will fill all the way down to the last empty row. In this case, it would stop in the cell before the word “number”.