Copy fill
 

I have a large file that resulted from a pivot. Along the first column of
the pivot I have cost center text that often looks like numbers but isn't
because many of the centers also have letters. In the second column of the
pivot I have job identifiers. Now, each cost center in column A may have
multiple jobs. I have to do further work on the pivot results so I copied the
values into another worksheet. My problem then becomes copying and filling
the blanks in column A with the corresponding cost center text. If I grab the
fill handle and double-click, the resulting fill assumes the number looking
text is numerical and increases each cell by one (when I want to fill the
blank spaces with the exact same text). Since my file is very large, this
becomes a major pain (I have to highlight the copy-from cell, do
control-copy, highlight the range of copy-to cells, and do control-paste). Is
there some easier way to do this?

Copy fill
 

Hey, I found the answer, thanks to Debrah Dalgleish in answer to a question
about pivot tables.

The answer is in a video located at
http://www.contextures.com/xlVideos01.html#FillBlanks

"Ray S." wrote:

I have a large file that resulted from a pivot. Along the first column of
the pivot I have cost center text that often looks like numbers but isn't
because many of the centers also have letters. In the second column of the
pivot I have job identifiers. Now, each cost center in column A may have
multiple jobs. I have to do further work on the pivot results so I copied the
values into another worksheet. My problem then becomes copying and filling
the blanks in column A with the corresponding cost center text. If I grab the
fill handle and double-click, the resulting fill assumes the number looking
text is numerical and increases each cell by one (when I want to fill the
blank spaces with the exact same text). Since my file is very large, this
becomes a major pain (I have to highlight the copy-from cell, do
control-copy, highlight the range of copy-to cells, and do control-paste). Is
there some easier way to do this?