Excel 2007 auto-complete feature

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:12:41 GMT

The Excel auto-complete feature sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. I've figured out some of the reasons why.

Auto-complete can be enabled or disabled in Excel's Options, under Advanced - Editing options. There is a checkbox for "Enable AutoComplete for cell values" which is selected by default.

With Auto-Complete enabled, when you type into a cell characters that match a previous entry in the same column, Excel will auto-complete the rest of the entry so that you can simply tab out without typing it all.

But sometimes, Auto-Complete doesn't work.

At first I thought it was related to there being any blank cells in the column above. If you fill each blank cell with a single period character, then sometimes Auto-complete starts working again, for lower cells. However, sometimes Auto-complete works fine, even when there are blank cells right above the cell you are typing! The explanation is that blank cells on their own don't interrupt Auto-Complete, but that a completely blank *row* does interrupt it.

In another situation, Auto-complete wasn't working, even when what I typed exactly matched the value in the cell right above it. This was due to my having set the column format to "Numeric". I had done that since the first 20 or so columns had numbers in them. Once I set the column formatting back to "General", then auto-complete started working again.

In another situation, Auto-complete stopped working, but after closing Excel and then reopening the spreadsheet, it worked again.

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Darkoshi

Excel 2007 auto-complete feature