Fill In Handle

Hi All -

I find that sometimes I can 'Fill Handle' can prefill a series easily, for example.

A1 = Product A
A2 = Product B
A3 = Product C


If I do the fill handle on cell A3 and drag down, I would expect the letter (A,B,C) to increase all the way to Z, for example.

But what happens is that it repeats, i.e. instead of filling 'Product D' it goes back to 'Product A' and starts over again, and again.

Any suggestions? I know the fill handle works well with numbers and thought Alphabet would be easy.

Well, think of it this way--

Are you expecting excel to evaluate every character of text in a string, determine that the last one is a single letter proceeded by a space character, and then increment only that letter to the next alphabetical letter as you pull down? What happens after Z? does it go to AA like with column labels? So now it's evaluating the last three characters....

Fill Handle works because it's just incrementing a number.

But evaluating a text string--you really gotta hold Excel's hand to do any of that, because it's a computer, not a person. It doesn't really "speak" text, only numbers.

When it's Fill Handle on a text array, it just goes 1-2-3-etc and repeats 1-2-3-etc without even looking at what 1, 2, 3 or etc is.

If you've only got like 20 rows, then just do it by hand. If not... you'll have to build a text formula to concatenate "Product " with some kinda incrementing thing.

thanks for that explaination ben - appreciated.