Tuesday Tech Tip
Helpful Hints
Google Tips: Auto-Fill
Google's spreadsheet has a great feature to help save you and your students time: Auto-fill. Auto-fill is arguably one of the most useful features of any spreadsheet program. Here's how it works in Google:
- Open a new Spreadsheet document in Google Drive by clicking on Create and then Spreadsheet.
- Enter the first piece of information in A1 (Column 1, Row 1). For this example, let's use today's date.
- Type tomorrow's date in A2.
- Now you can tell Google to auto-fill in the rest of the dates for you. Select both A1 and A2 by left-clicking on A1 and dragging your mouse over A2. You should see a blue box appear around A1 and a light blue box highlighting the two cells.
- Look for the tiny dark blue box at the bottom right of the highlighted area. In this case, it should be at the bottom right of A2. Press the ALT key (OPTION on a Mac) and click and drag this box down to A5. You will notice a dotted line around the cells as you do this. This line indicates the cells you want to auto-fill.
If you do this right, you should see the dates advancing. The cool thing about Google's Auto-fill is that, if it recognizes a pattern, it will fill cells in in relation to that pattern. If no pattern is recognized, Auto-fill will just repeat the information.
There are a number of useful patterns that auto-fill recognizes. Options include days of the week, months, years, countries, cities, car makers, and more. Have your students see if they can find other patterns recognized by Google.