In case you have a blank row in the dataset, fill handle would only work till the last contiguous non-blank row.Īlso, note that in case you don’t have data in the adjacent column, double-clicking the fill handle would not work. In this case, the pattern was that the numbers were getting incrementing by 1. Note that Fill Handle automatically identifies the pattern and fill the remaining cells with that pattern.
#HOW DO I NUMBER COLUMNS IN EXCEL PLUS#
Double-click on the fill handle square (while the cursor is in the plus icon form) and it will automatically fill all the cells until the end of the dataset.Hover the cursor over this square, and you will notice that the cursor changes to a plus icon.Note that there would be a small square at the bottom-right of the selection.Here are the steps to quickly number the rows using the fill handle: Suppose you have a dataset as shown below: 1] Using Fill Handleįill handle identifies a pattern from a few filled cells and can easily be used to quickly fill the entire column. You can choose any one of the methods that work based on your dataset. Or, you might have a dataset that has a few blank rows in it, and you only want to number the rows that are filled. The best way to number the rows in Excel would depend on the kind of data set that you have.įor example, you may have a continuous data set that starts from row 1, or a dataset that start from a different row.