our blog

How to quickly duplicate text from upper/right cell in Excel

Sometimes copying in Excel can be done in one command

In Excel, you sometimes need to copy the contents of the upper cell to the cell where the cursor is. This operation consists of four simple steps: 

  • Move the cursor to the upper cell
  • Press CTRL+C (Copy)
  • Move the cursor back to the lower cell 
  • Press CTRL+V (Paste)

But when you need to do it many times, the operation becomes quite tedious.

The solution is very easy: use the shortcut CTRL+D. The contents of the upper cell are duplicated immediately. You do not even need to move the cursor. Instead of performing four steps, you perform only one.

Similarly, if you need to quickly copy the text from the left cell, just press CTRL+R:

The usefulness of these two shortcuts grows even further when you need to duplicate the contents of a cell to several cells below. For example, if you need to copy the contents into 10 cells, select them all (including the cell to be duplicated):

Then press CTRL+D. All selected cells are populated with the contents of the very first cell:

CTRL+R command makes duplicating “to the right” similarly.

Shortcuts speed up your work. Ironically, these are the standard Excel shortcuts, but only a few people know about them. The only thing you should remember is: that they do not work if a filter is applied on the Excel sheet.

Recommended content

How to get rid of the “Failed to save target content: The illustration <…> was moved between paragraphs” error in Trados Studio

Sometimes it is easier to remove an error than to find its reason Here is what we’ve got this time: Failed to save target content: The illustration <…> was moved between paragraphs. The error occurs when you try generating a “clean” translated document. The message suggests that the document has undergone either source editing or […]

Everybody paints!

About neural art: DALL-E, Midjourney, Starryai, etc. Neural networks, such as DALL-E, which generate impossible realistic images with a text description have brought dramatic distress among artists, especially illustrators and graphic designers. Why learn to paint if the computer can paint more, better, and more quickly? Today, it is hard to say what kind of future […]

About the differences between human and machine translation

Semi-philosophical note 1. Translation is technically sense rendering. 2. Machines are unable to operate senses. Conclusion: machine translation is no translation. “Machine translation” is an oxymoron: translation cannot be done by a machine. If it is performed by a machine, it is no translation; if it is performed by a human, it is not machine […]

How to remove the “The translation memory … could not be opened” error in Trados Studio

What danger lies in clouds When several translators are working on a big project simultaneously, it seems very alluring to put the translation memory in some cloud, connect all the vendors to it, and the translations of one of them will be immediately available to all the others as if working with a server or […]

The Philippines and the Spanish language

Linguogeographic notes In 1542, two islands of the archipelago, which would receive the name of the Philippines later,—Leyte and Samar—were named Felipinas after Philip (Felipe) II, the king of Spain at that time. After that, the name of “the Philippines” (Las Islas Filipinas) was extended to the whole archipelago. Up to 1989, for almost 400 years, the Philippines have […]