Excel users can save tons of time working with data if they take advantage of some not-so-obvious ways to get extra mileage out of the fill handle feature. For the uninitiated, the fill handle is the small black box that sits in the bottom-right corner of a cell or selection of cells.

Excel fill handle tricks

This illustrated lesson walks users through some special ways to use this feature and quickly accomplish tasks such as copying and incrementing entries, inserting a series of dates, copying a formula down through a column, and creating a custom fill list.

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