1. In Excel menu click Tools.
2. In the Tools menu click Options.
3. Click the Custom Lists tab.
4. Click the Add button. The cursor will move the List entries edit box.
5. Enter the data for your list separated by commas. E.g. East, West, North, South.

Now if you enter “East” in any cell and drag the fill handle, other cells will automatically be filled with West, North … etc.

Applies to: Excel 2003

You can save yourself allot of typing if you know how to make use of autofill feature in Excel.

Suppose you want to enter names of days in cells A1 to A7 (Sun, Mon, …. Sat). Here is what you do:

1. Enter “Sun” on cell “A1”.
2. Drag the fill handle across the cells that you want to fill (A2 to A7).

You can also use Autofill to enter your own series of numbers. For example you can fill cells with the numbers 5,10,15,20 … etc as follows:

1. Select the first cell in the range that you want to fill.
2. Type the starting value for the series (5 in our example).
3. Type a value in the next cell to establish a pattern (10).
4. Select the first two cells that contain the starting values.
5. Drag the fill handle across the range that you want to fill.

Applies to: Excel 2003