Creating text, numerical, date, and time lists in a flash

- The right mouse button is a valuable tool in Excel. it allows us to get to a shortcut menu. But we can also drag with the right mouse button, sometimes referred to as a right drag. It allows us to fill in data pretty quickly by way of a menu. So it still, you could say, adheres to the definition of the right mouse button always means shortcut menu. In this worksheet in column A here, we're about to put in some sales numbers here. And we want to set up for the year a mid-month report. In other words, the 15th of every month.

Now we could be using any day we want here, but we're using the 15th, and we'd like to fill this in for the remainder of the year. So, instead of putting in February 15th just below this, highlighting both and dragging, we can certainly do that, why not type nothing, but instead use the right mouse button here. On the fill handle I'm holding down the right mouse button, dragging down here to about row 13, releasing the right mouse button and then the menu appears Fill Months. In other words these are all a month apart always on the 15th.

We could do that with any day of the month. However, if it's at the end of the month, and here's an example of the 31st. We know of course, there's not a 31st for every month. Let's use Fill Months here. If the starting date is the last day of a given month, in this case it is. And we don't always start with January though. If we use the right mouse button here and fill this in. And maybe we'll do this for a two year period. Drag it down to about row 25 or thereabouts. Again releasing the right mouse button we see our menu, Fill Months.

And as you would wish and hope, Excel does what you would want it to do here. This is the last day of the month. So is this, so is this. On and on and on. February 28th, 2015, February 29th in 2016. So if the starting day is the last day of the month, we do see what the result is here. By the way if we put in January 30th here and dragged, we would get the 28th of February here, then we'd get March 30th here and so on. Make sure the starting day is the last day of the month, if you want to make sure all the subsequent entries are the last day of that month.

Now, a different need over in column F. We're a five day a week operation. We only have sales each weekday. We'd like to set up a report here, for let's say, roughly the remainder of the year. So we use the right mouse button here, but we only want to put in weekdays. If we were to do this by way of a formula, it would be somewhat involved and complicated. We'd have to be using the IF function and also the Weekday function to come up with some kind of a scheme here to make sure that we were only putting in the days Monday through Friday.

But it's much, much simpler if we use the right mouse button here. So I'm going to drag downward with the right mouse button. Guessing we have to go to about row 50, 55 or thereabouts, I'm not sure exactly. So, drag it down here. I'm using the right mouse button here. And as I release the right mouse button, here's the menu. I went to Fill Weekdays, just Mondays through Fridays. You don't have to start with a weekday, although logically you probably would in almost all cases. Fill Weekdays. There we are, we see our list.

That's a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Notice no Saturday, Sunday. And then all over again we see our five day groupings here with no Saturdays and Sundays. This is all by way of the right mouse button. There's another use for dragging with the right mouse button. This time we'll set up a chart. Let's say we got an identical set of sales figures here. We'd like to project these forward. We can do this by way of a right drag, but let's set up the chart first. Let's imagine we want to show both sets of figures here.

The initial set is going to be identical, and let's say we're going to extend this, say onto row 17, like this. Let's set up the chart first. We can do this quickly with Alt+F1. There's the chart. Let's make this be a line chart. So on the contextual design tab open the ribbon. Off to the right, Change Chart Type. There we are, line chart. Usually with line charts the fourth option tends to work best. There we are, so we see that. Now, with the Sales 1 figures in column J, they're highlighted.

I'm going to use the right mouse button here. Drag down to row 17, and as I release the right mouse button here's a choice called Linear Trend. This is going to extend those numbers based on regression analysis techniques, extend this in a straight line rightward. So, based on an analysis of these numbers, linear regression says you will grow at this rate for the remaining months. And we see that straight line entry out there.

And the top number there is about 165. Now we've got an alternate choice here. We could grow exponentially, so highlighting these cells and using the right mouse button, dragging the fill handle downward, we can choose Growth Trend. And we see exponential growth here. So, we see 165 and 330. That's roughly 2:1 ratio. That's coincidental. But nevertheless, we see what's happening here. If we didn't have this feature available, we could get here in another way.

So I'm going to take out these numbers here that I just put in. Highlight those and delete. And right clicking on the line choose Add Trendline. And immediately we see, automatically, a linear trend. And notice how that reaches the value 165. We don't see that literally on the screen, but we can see this is the same line that we had seen earlier as a linear growth. Exponential is analogous to the word growth that we saw earlier. This should go to about 330 if we choose Exponential.

And there it is, you can see how that's working out too. So, possibly you will use the trendline feature to see an actual line here. Or in our example here, and I'll go back to it. Highlighting these cells again, and with the right mouse button dragging down to row 17 here as we did earlier. Linear Trend, we see that. And now, doing this with Growth Trend, we'll see a line that coincides with that dash line there. Dragging down here and using Growth Trend.

And we see those entries there. And so we've seen examples here using the right mouse button to drag entries, and thereby get menus. Remember our first example here. We dragged and we filled with months. Over here we filled with months as well. Over here we filled weekdays. And then our last two examples, we saw how we could use in combination with a chart, a display of growth trends by way of extension using the right mouse button.