How to drag Copy In Excel
Spreadsheet tips: Drag Copy
0:00 / 0:00
Quality:
Sharing buttons:
one of the reasons we use spreadsheets
is that they can do repetitive tasks for
us for example so I want this text to
appear in lots of cells well one way I
could do it is to type it myself another
way would be to go to edit copy click
edit paste or I could use the keyboard
shortcuts propeller sea and propeller V
but even that's fairly slow compared to
one of the features of spreadsheets
which is the drag copy now with the drag
copy all I do is click on the cell that
has the information I want to copy go to
the corner now you'll notice the cursor
changes to little crosshair I clicked
hold the mouse button down and drag and
you can see it's selecting some other
cells there and then it copies the
contents down and it also works across
rows so if I click in a Cell click in
the corner hold the mouse button down
and drag and it will copy the contents
now that's nice and quick and that's
nice and helpful but it's even more
powerful let's have a look at this next
sheet on this sheet I've got one Monday
in January now again if I copy I drag
copy I click and I drag you'll see it
copies the one all the way down just as
we'd expect and the same with the Monday
and the same with the January but what's
really special about spreadsheets and
the drag copy is there's a slight
intelligence to it for example I've got
a one and a two and I highlight the two
cells and drag copy it works out that
there's a pattern there and then it
increases the number by that gap every
time and with days I select the two
cells drag copy down
it works out that their days of the week
and it copies the days of the week down
I've just got a little bit of truncated
data so I'm just gonna change the size
of that cell that's better and it also
works with months - so I'll select those
two and drag copy down and you can see
that says January February March April
and it's worked out the next month to
appear now here's a lovely little thing
it also does look at this - for I
highlight the two and drag down what's
going to happen it works out the pattern
two four six eight ten twelve so that's
brilliant that's really useful adding
labels to our columns and our rows now
let's have a look at what else it can do
now here on sheet 3 I've got column a
I've got a column B and I'm going to
work out the total of these numbers so
I'm going to add them together so I'm
going to put in a formula and put equals
and let's pick a two and let's add b2
and it works out the total and if I want
to put the same formula in each of those
normally I would type it in
but again the drag copy works and when
you drag copy instead of copying the
formula exactly a two to be - what it
will do as it goes down it will
recognize that this is a new row and it
will increment the numbers so they'll
become a three a four a five as we go
down so let's just see if that's true so
I drag down we get our totals let's show
the formula let's see what's happening
and you can see it has indeed just
increase the numbers as we go down now
let's just look at the results again and
you can see it's added those up nicely
let's go to sheet 4 and see that this
works
across the columns as well so if I'm
going to work out the average so this
time it's equals average bracket them in
a highlight the numbers in there so you
can see it goes from B 1 to B 5 now this
time as I drag across the rows will stay
the same so we still want it to be 1 to
5 but it will be the column that changes
so again I'm going to drag copy it works
out the averages for us if I show the
formula let's just expand that so we can
see them you can see that it is b 1 b 5
c 1 c 5 d 1 d 5 you want a 5 so it's
changed the column each time now that's
great for us because it saves so much
time when we've got lots of repetitive
formulas to do as in our example here it
saves us typing it in again and again
and again for each column
