Double-Click the Fill Handle to Copy a Formula

You have thousands of rows of data. You've added a new formula in the top row of your data set, something like =PROPER(A2&" "&B2), as shown below. You now need to copy the formula down to all of the rows of your data set.

Many people will grab the Fill Handle and start to drag down. But as you drag down, Excel starts going faster and faster. Starting in Excel 2010, there is a 200-microsecond pause at the last row of data. 200 microseconds is long enough for you to notice the pause but not long enough for you to react and let go of the mouse button. Before you know it, you've dragged the Fill Handle way too far.

The solution is to double-click the Fill Handle! Go to exactly the same spot where you start to drag the Fill Handle. The mouse pointer changes to a black plus sign. Double-click.

Excel looks at the surrounding data, finds the last row with data today, and copies the formula down to the last row of the data set.

In the past, empty cells in the column to the left would cause the "double-click the Fill Handle" trick to stop working just before the empty cell. But as you can see below, names like Madonna, Cher, or Pele will not cause problems. Provided that there is at least a diagonal path (for example, via B76-A77-B78), Excel will find the true bottom of the data set.

In my live Power Excel seminars, this trick always elicits a gasp from half the people in the room. It is my number-one time-saving trick.

Alternatives to Double-Clicking the Fill Handle

This trick is an awesome trick if all you've done to this point is drag the Fill Handle to the bottom of the data set. But there are even faster ways to solve this problem:

• Use Tables. If you select one cell in A1:B112 and press Ctrl+T, Excel formats the range as a table. Once you have a table, simply enter the formula in C2. When you press Enter, it is copied to the bottom.

• Use a complex but effective keyboard shortcut. This shortcut requires the adjacent column to have no empty cells. While it seems complicated to explain, the people who tell me about this shortcut can do the entire thing in the blink of an eye.

Here are the steps:

1. From your newly entered formula in C2, press the Left Arrow key to move to cell B2.

2. Press Ctrl+Down Arrow to move to the last row with data — in this case, B112.

3. Press the Right Arrow key to return to the bottom of the mostly empty column C.

4. From cell C112, press Ctrl+Shift+Up Arrow. This selects all of the blank cells next to your data, plus the formula in C2.

5. Press Ctrl+D to fill the formula in C2 to all of the blanks in the selection. Ctrl+D is fill Down.

Note: Ctrl+R fills right, which might be useful in other situations.

As an alternative, you can get the same results by pressing Ctrl+C before step 1 and replacing step 5 with pressing Ctrl+V.

Thanks to the following people who suggested this tip: D. Carmichael, Shelley Fishel, Dawn Gilbert, @Knutsford_admi, Francis Logan, Michael Ortenberg, Jon Paterson, Mike Sullivan and Greg LambertLane suggested Ctrl+D. Bill Hazlett, author of Excel for the Math Classroom, pointed out Ctrl+R.

Break Apart Data

You have just seen how to join data, but people often ask about the opposite problem: how to parse data that is all in a single column. Say you wanted to sort the data in the figure below by zip code:

Select the data in A2:A99 and choose Data, Text to Columns. Because some city names, such as Sioux Falls, are two words, you cannot break the data at each occurrence of a space. Instead, you need to use a comma to get the city in column A and the state and zip code in column B, so choose Delimited in step 1 of the wizard and click Next.

In step 2 of the wizard, deselect Tab and select Comma. The preview at the bottom of the dialog shows what your data will look like. Click Next.

Caution: For the rest of the day after you use Text to Columns, Excel will remember the choices you've chosen in step 2 of the Convert Text to Columns Wizard. If you copy data from Notepad and paste to Excel, it will be split at the comma. This is often maddening because most days, the data is not parsed at the comma, but for the rest of today, it will be. To fix it, close and re-open Excel.

Step 3 of the wizard asks you to declare each column as General, Text, or Date. It is fine to leave the columns set as General.

After you've split the state and zip code to column B, select B2:B99 and again choose Data, Text to Columns. This time, since each state is two characters, you can use Fixed Width in step 1 of the wizard. To preserve leading zeros in the zip code, select the second column and...