Using Autofill In Numbers

Numbers can automatically fill in cells for you if you want to repeat a value, or create a sequence. You can use Autofill to add a set of sequential numbers or dates to cells. You can also have the cells follow a pattern. If you are using tables properly, formulas included in cells will repeat as you add new rows to the table.

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can fill cells in Numbers.
We're looking at Numbers version 3.0. I'm going to show you how to autofill cells.
So say you need to fill a lot of cells with a value. Well, there are several different ways to do it. For instance, I can type a number in here and then I can simply select it and copy. Then I can select any range of cells I want and paste and it will paste that same value in there.
Likewise if I had two cells and I selected both of them and then I selected a range of cells that made sense and I did a paste you can see it copies them and it knows it is supposed to copy the two of these over and over again.
Now another thing you can do is you can put a value into a cell and then you can simply select the cell. Notice that a yellow dot appears at the center bottom. You can drag that and you can see that it will repeat the value there. The same thing happens to the right, drag it out to repeat the value there.
What is really cool is say if I were to enter 1, 2, 3 and then I would select all three of these cells and drag. Numbers is smart enough to realize I am doing a sequence here and it is going to complete that sequence. So it will even do this for date values. If I do like the first of the year and I select this or I just drag it down it is going to be smart enough to realize that in terms of dates I probably don't want to repeat that same date over and over again but that I want to increment it for each one.
Now when it comes to formulas Numbers is pretty smart too. If I want to post a bunch of numbers in here and then do a formula that adds these together, do the sum of these three here, of course when I copy and paste it below, copy paste right there, and if I do some numbers here it is going to figure it out and it is going to do it for each row. It is going to move this from sum of B2 to D2 to B3 to D3.
What is really cool is that if I were to shrink this down here so this is the entire table and say I want to add another row it is going to figure out that while I need to enter unique values for these, this is a formula that I probably want to repeat. There you go. It put the formula in there and now it will work. And as many as I add it is always going to add this formula into the row. Of course I can always delete it but chances are if you are doing something like this you want this to Autofill and repeat for as many as you are going to add in.
So Autofill is even smart enough to realize that you are doing things like, for instance, do January here and I'm going to drag this out. Look at that. It even recognizes that I am doing the months of the year and it is also smart enough to realize if I am doing a sequence. So if I do say 5, 10, 15 and I select these and I drag down you can see it is going to increase by fives.

Using Autofill In Numbers

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