"dawn brist" wrote in message
...
I want to do a continuous +1 in A1 thru A17 - ex. A1 = H03860, A2 =
H03861,
A3 = H03862 ------ yes I feel very stupid asking this!


You should be aware that what you wish to do is not to *format* the
column: I would describe it as "extending a value within a column".
'John' has said here how this is done. The same thing can, of
course, be done horizontally - extending a value within a row.
This dragging facility has other uses, too.
If you put a 'day', 'month' or 'date' in A1 (say Monday or January
or 02/02/2009), the same dragging process (horiz. or vert.) can be used
to populate automatically adjacent cells with Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, etc. or February, March, April, etc. or 03/02/2009,
04/02/2009, etc.

Hope this helps! Isn't Excel bluddy marvellous? Is there
*anything* that can't be done with it - if you know how, of course! But
I'm very much a newbie.

--
DB.