Autofill

When dealing with spreadsheets it's pretty typical to want to add a set of cells that contain a series of numbers or dates or other values. While this can be done by hand, Gnumeric implements an autofill option to allow these sorts of series to be easily filled in.

A typical example of when you want to use this feature is to fill a series of numbers, maybe a list of part numbers, or a perhaps a list of TV channels. To create a list like this, all the user needs to do is to enter the first number into a cell, click on the autofill cursor in the bottom right corner of the cell border, and finally drag it in the direction to fill. If the first cell contains a '1', for example, dragging the autofill button(see Figure 1-14) down three or four cells will fill the cells with '1','2','3', and '4' automatically.(see Figure 1-15)

Autofilling a range of cells

  1. Select the cell that marks the beginning of the area to autofill

  2. Enter the starting value into this cell

  3. Click the small rectangle in the bottom right corner of the first cell, and drag it to the end of the area to fill.

  4. Release the mouse button. The cells in the selected area should now be filled with autofilled values

Figure 1-14. A cell with the seed for an autofill.

Figure 1-15. A set of cells being autofilled

As handy as being able to simply and quickly generate series of numbers incremented by one is, autofill can do much much more. The next simplest example is autofilling with a series using an increment other than 1. For example, to create a series that consist of odd numbers starting at 11, just enter '11' into a cell and '13' into the next cell. Then select both cells, and stretch the selection in order to cover the cells to be filled. If you select the next 5 cells, for example, they will be filled with values '15','17','19','21', and '23.' See Figure 1-16 and Figure 1-17 for example.

Figure 1-16. A seed cell for a date autofill.

Figure 1-17. A set of cells being filled with a sequence.

Filling with Dates

Oh, but numbers are easy you say! The real painful stuff is entering dates and