Forum Discussion
mwtbealwestnetcomau
Jun 05, 2023Copper Contributor
Dates in my excel not filling sequentially only copying
I wish to auto fill dates but my excel fill handle only copies the date, it does not fill sequentially. Can some one please advise
SnowMan55
Oct 06, 2023Bronze Contributor
It seems that you want to clean the litter box more often than once a year. 😉
Your screenshot is quite useful in identifying the problem. Notice that your formula bar contains "Friday, 10/5/24". But Excel does not display dates that way in the formula bar. (You can, of course, make Excel display dates that way within cells.) And the different "dates" in column A entries start with "Friday, ", even when those dates do not fall on a Friday; Excel will not make that kind of mistake.
Your problem is that you have text values in those cells. Excel is autofilling, but it is incrementing only the numeric portion (two digits) it finds at the end of the text.
To get this correct, clear the contents of those "date" cells, and make sure column A is formatted as General (this format will be changed later). Then enter just the first date (in your case, in the m/d/yy format, or yyyy-mm-dd format, or whatever comes naturally to you and is recognized by Excel as a date). For the general case, enter the next expected date in the cell below that, to give Excel an idea as to the pattern of values to follow. Then use the fill handle to autofill dates as far down as desired.
To get the day of week to appear within the cells in the format you seem to want, assign those cells (or simply, the entire column) the custom format "dddd, d/m/yy" (without the quotes, of course):
As dates/times are implicitly based on numbers, the cell values are displayed by default aligned to the right, but you can override that if desired.
JoeAllen999
Oct 06, 2023Copper Contributor
SnowMan55 thanks for your thoughtful and detailed response. I will edit the dates as you suggested. Grateful.