Excel - Fill Down with Student Names

But the user would like to “fill down” the student name so each line is associated with the student and can then be fully sorted/filtered.

The following instructions are presented from the Mac version of Office but should work equally as well with the Windows version of Office.

Instructions for “Fill Down” with Student Names

Select the student name column.

 On the Home Ribbon, go to the Find & Select menu.

Select Go to Special.

Next, choose the Blanks option and click OK on the Go To Special Menu.

Now create a formula to fill the cells with the information above.  While the blanks are still selected, in the first cell available (in this example, A4), enter the formula:

                         =(up arrow key)            

                         and then command+enter keys together  to fill all the blank cells with the formula

This will fill in the blanks with the information from above, putting a student name on each row.

The final step is to turn the highlighted entries that were just created into actual values instead of formula entries by:

• Selecting the column
• Copy the column (control C or Edit → Copy)
• And while still highlighting the column use Paste Special so the cells will only be Values with Edit → Paste Special and choose Values and OK.

The spreadsheet now has student names associated with each line.