How To Create An AutoFill in Google Sheets

<div> What's up? Welcome to Autofill . We're gonna create an autofill and how we're gonna do that, if you wanna know real quickly, we're gonna make a dropdown dropdown with data validation 's. Gonna do that for us. Actually, before I go into any further, if that's all you want to know, here's how to do it. So we might have a list, say of articles, all these titles and all these URLs, and we just wanna see what we wanna type it in.

You know, something we might normally do.  is, if you know about this, if you have a list and you just start typing at the bottom of that list or at the top, and from the beginning, you'll have auto fill . Media, you can do how, see it has autofill already, but if you're not, like how do you get that functionality? Well, you can do that with a dropdown menu with data validation . So you just do right click data validation and for your range , many times people will use a range of like a few to use a dropdown , like a selection. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna do articles.

We're gonna, actually, let me show you this, just.  data validation . Just click this and all we're gonna do is this entire column , so A to a and where is the button? There's the save button right over my head. And now we have a dropdown menu, which if you just click the this button, it's gonna try to load lot and it's just awful. But if we just go to the cell, we can even, and we just start typing. Anything. See now we have a selection and it's a autofill and it's autofill of any, any word in that in there. So see, young, we wanna know all of everything. Maybe YouTube. . See?

So like now we have an auto fill and that's all you need to know. If that's all you came for, then that's all you need to know. What else I'm gonna talk about is why we might need an autofill . You might wanna do it if you are creating like a playlist. If you have maybe a hundred songs, like if you had billboard.  100 for the last 50 years, and you wanna only pick like 50 of the best songs. And you just want to type in the names. You could put on this, this sheet, you know, all the names of those songs. And then starting here, if you just remembered a couple words .

And also we might want to, you know, create collections in sort of a simple way. And there might be more information that you will wanna know. So like out of, for all these articles, maybe I'm creating a list and I want to get the URL as well. So this dropdown menu is good to get the name, but what if I want other information? Well, I can use the lookup. So how that works.  is I just wanna search for that cuz we know that that's the key that we're searching for. It's gonna be in range A to B and we won't column two. And actually want also false is it's not sorted. It enter.

And now we have the url. Now we have the URL of each of these as we search for them. Let me see. Just a list of articles from my newsletter that I picked just to get a lot of stuff. So like, here, we'll pick that and see. We now have a list of URLs for these as well. So what you can do is you can use V lookup, but what's gonna happen is, let me see if I can find it when there's a quotation mark. Oh,  it, it did error out before, but there's another way. So there's.  The there's a problem here sometimes some of these will error out and I wonder if it got fixed since.

Yeah, so it's, it's fixed now. But sometime you might want to also find, like this title will be in column B and you wanna do column A, and so you'll want to use index match for that to go equals index . And we're gonna index on articles. Eight to eight. And what we're gonna, oh, actually we we're, we want B to B, and what we're gonna do is match , and we're gonna search for this and we're gonna match it to articles 0.8 to eight. Zero. Do you want an exact match ? And that brings up the same thing, right?

So what that's really useful for is if we flip these around, if it, maybe we had the URL in column A and the title in column B. See how all that last articles, see now these are errored and you can't do that, and you have to have the key in the left hand column. But now we have index match . We can figure that out. So what's gonna happen too is like, if you wanna say get durations, you can use it here. If you have a playlist and you wanna get a running time, you can get all your durations here and then you can say, okay, this total time of all of these together is an hour.

You can have sums if you wanna just pick out a few of these articles and you know the word count and you want to sum up all those. Come, there's lots of different uses of this, but I just always thought that this auto fill was really cool and you can really be typing anything in and find exactly what you want and it'll match any word whatsoever. In here, like, and it even highlights it. It's, it's a really simple thing. And, and again, you will almost never find this out because, you know, like this, this dropdown is mainly used for Dr.  drop down menus.

So hopefully that helps you out with a cool, some cool projects you have.</div>