Spreadsheets

Unit 2: Creating More Effective Spreadsheets

Lesson 6: Working With Formulas and Functions


How do you copy labels, values, and formulas?

You'll often find that multiple cells need to contain the same, or nearly the same, formulas.

Rather than retyping each formula, you can easily copy the contents of one cell into other cells. Variants on the basic cut-and-paste technique are powerful tools for rapidly building your spreadsheet and minimizing typographical errors.

To do a simple copy and paste, follow these steps:

  1. Select a cell to copy.
  2. Choose the Copy command from the Edit menu.
  3. Select the cell to copy the information to (call this the paste-to location).
  4. Choose the Paste command from the Edit menu.

When you do this, the following happens:

That's how basic Copy/Paste works in the spreadsheet.

It's crucial to understand the difference between relative and absolute cell references. Although they behave identically within a formula, they copy differently. Most cell references in your formulas will be relative ones, so that you can replicate one formula to operate over different blocks of raw data simply by pasting the formula to other locations.

For more information, study the following concepts:

Here are some variants on copy-and-paste that you may find useful:

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