Excel Auto-Fill Won't Continue Series

Question

Hi, I am using Office 365 Enterprise on Windows. I am trying to get the auto-fill to continue a very simple, obvious series but nothing I do is working. First, I am in a brand new workbook - no filters, no frozen rows/columns, no formatting, and I have the fill handle and automatic calculations enabled in Options. I want to populate the alphabet in a column, so I enter "A" in A1, "B" in A2, "C" in A3. Then I highlight all 3 cells and drag down the fill handle, and it repeats A,B,C,A,B,C. If I select blank cell A4, click the Flash-Fill Drop-Down, and click "Down", it enters letter "C". If I select the three blank cells A4, A5 and A6 and click the Flash-Fill Drop-Down, and click "Down", nothing happens - nothing is entered in the cell. If I click the Flash-Fill Drop-Down, and click "Series" and select Series In "Columns" and Type "Linear", nothing happens. If I repeat any other combinations including Type "Growth" or "Autofill", nothing happens. If I select either one blank cell (A4) or three blank cells (A4-A6), click the Flash-Fill Drop-Down, and select "Flash Fill", I get a message saying "We looked at all the data next to your selection and didn't see a pattern- for filling in values for you". Really, Excel can't see (or interpret) the A,B,C pattern in cells A1-A3??? If I hold down CTRL while dragging the fill handle, it still repeats A,B,C,A,B,C. If I hold down the Shift key while dragging the fill handle, nothing happens. I have tried formatting the fields as Text, but it doesn't change any of the previously mentioned behaviors. I have tried every suggestion I could find "out there" from Googling, and no matter what I try it does not work. ALSO, doing the exact same steps with numbers 1,2,3 instead of A,B,C yields the same results. This makes NO sense. Does anybody out there know the secret?

Answer 1

Re: "Really, Excel can't see (or interpret) the A,B,C pattern"

seems not, I get the same, except where you say: "ALSO, doing the exact same steps with numbers 1,2,3 instead of A,B,C yields the same results." I DO get the expected 3,4,5,6 etc.

I think, if you're needing to do this a lot with the alphabet, you'll need to create your own custom list as I have done here:

You can reach this dialogue box in at least 2 ways:

1. Via File|Options, Advanced, then towards the bottom of the page, Edit Custom Lists:

or 2. via sorting something on a sheet, where you choose Custom List… :

Once such a custom list is created you should be good to go. That new (upper case) list even worked for lower case alphabet characters!

Answer 2

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't do it often so I don't need to design a workaround - I just want to know what I'm missing because I have been using Excel for a thousand years and have never had this problem. I had another strange thing happen after I posted this question - I manually entered the alphabet in A1-A26, and then I tried to use auto-fill and dragged down to row A52 to see if it would duplicate the entire thing like it was when I was just using the first three letters, and it worked up to the letter "P" and then started over with "A" - VERY strange. Normally I would assume I had done something along the way to make that happen but, again, I was in a brand new, shiny clean workbook. I'm stumped.

Answer 3

re: "and it worked up to the letter "P" and then started over with "A" - VERY strange"

Not my experience, full alphabet repeating (no custom list).