Make Excel Automatically Fill Blank Cells

Often you’ll only fill some cells in Excel spreadsheet — for instance, in a list including data sorted by months, you might only include the month name the first time it appears. That can become an issue when you choose to sort or filter the data. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get Excel to auto-fill those cells.

Tech blogger Helen Bradley outlines the process you need. Essentially, you follow this procedure:

• Select the relevant column.
• On the Home tab, find Find & Select, choose Special from the drop-down and choose Blanks, then click OK. This selects all the empty cells.
• Type =A2 (or whatever the address of the first cell which contains the data you want to duplicate) into the first blank cell. (You should already be in this cell). Type Control-Enter to automatically fill all the other cells.
• If you want to change the text to not include cell references, select the relevant cells and then choose Paste –> Values.

Hit the post for a detailed walkthrough.

Excel fill intermittently empty cells [Helen Bradley]