Excel: Copying A Field Without Incrementing

How do you prevent Excel from auto-incrementing when you copy cells? In this blog, I show 2 examples in which I want to copy column data down, however, I do not want the data to increment. There is an easy way to prevent this auto increment, you just have to know which button to click!

Example 1: Address List.

I have an address for a family of 5 that I need to copy from the first person to the other 4 people.

When I click on the square in bottom right of the cell to copy the address down to the rows 3-6 here is the result:

The Address increments by 1 each time. This is not ideal as all 5 people live at the same address.

Alternatively, if you hold down the Ctrl button as your copy the cells down, you will see the intended result.

Example 2: Months.

Let’s say you want all of the fields in column D to say January. January is not a number, so you wouldn’t expect the subsequent cells to increment when copied.

Let’s try to copy and them and see what happens. You will see a similar increment result to below:

To prevent the months from incrementing, again, you can hold the Ctrl button down as you drag the square in bottom corner of the cell to copy down. Here is the result: