Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Copying Cells to Fill a Range.
Excel provides a pair of nifty shortcut keys that can be used to copy cells down and to the right. For instance, let's say you want to copy the contents of cell C3 to the fifteen cells just below it. All you need to do is select the sixteen cells (making sure that cell C3 is the top cell in the selection) and then press Ctrl+D. Cell C3 is copied to all the other cells below it.
Likewise, if you want to copy cells to the right, you can simply make a selection and press Ctrl+R. The value of the left-most cell in the selection will be copied to its right, filling out the selected range.
You can combine these two shortcuts to fill an entire range of cells. Let's say that you have a value in cell C3 and you want it copied to the range C3:M24. All you need to do is select that range and then press Ctrl+D and immediately press Ctrl+R. The first command copies the first row downward, which means that C3:C24 now contains the desired value. When you press Ctrl+R, everything in C3:C24 is copied to the right so that the entire range of C3:M24 is filled.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10261) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, and 2013. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Copying Cells to Fill a Range.
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2019-02-05 15:38:20
Surendera M. Bhanot
Hi chirag, ^L and ^U are the comand for filling left and up the selected cell.
2019-02-04 05:10:40
Martyn Crawford
Fantastic tip, as always – thanks Allen!
Worth noting that (unlike double clicking a handle to copy or fill to the same row as an adjacent range of cells), if you use Ctrl+D and you have data in cells below your top (i.e. source) cell, those data will be overwritten by whatever was in your top cell, and you then don't have the option to fill/fill without formatting/fill only formatting. The same applies to Ctrl+R. If you bear that in mind, it's a really useful tip, and I wish I'd known about it sooner!
2014-11-24 22:17:09
Chirag
Hi
Is there any way to fill left cells from right cell or copy from bottom cell to cell above. Just opposite to Ctrl+D and Ctrl+R?
Thanks
Chirag
2014-11-22 12:06:49
bdriskell
another nifty, incredibly powerful, fill method--if you have a contiguous column of cells (no gaps or empty cells), you can add a value or formula into an adjacent cell and then double-click on the tiny square in lower right corner of the cell. Voila! Instant fill to the bottom. This is particularly useful cuz it doesn't require you to pre-select the fill area as is needed for the ctrl methods above. It's also good for filling in with a series (start by selecting two 'filler' cells to tell excel what the sequence step is). It's particularly useful when you have mega-pages of data to fill, i.e., an onerous pre-selection task. I have had some failure issues using the dbl-click with filtered data sets that I haven't yet pinned down. My fall back is then the methods above.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, and 2013. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: 
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