If you are trying to drag down a date in Excel without it changing and adding 1 day to each subsequent date, there are some useful shortcuts for this.
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Date copy down adds day instead of staying the same
As shown below, if you have a date in a cell, and you left click in the bottom right corner to copy it down, it automatically adds a day to each copied cell (works similar with numbers).
So when I let go it will look like the below, where each cell is 1 day more than the previous date when you actually want it to stay the same.
Copy the SAME date to multiple cell (Method 1)
You can use the CTRL + D shortcut to stop this, and the process is exactly the same as above with the 1 extra step of pushing CTRL + D when you have let go.
So below I:
- entered the date 1 Jan 2024 in cell A4
- Clicked and dragged down on the bottom right fill handle (dates add 1 day but don’t worry about this)
- Let go and clicked on CTRL + D
All the previous dates are changed to match the first date in the list.
Drag dates in Excel without incrementing (Method 2)
Another way which is also easy it to hold the CTRL key down while you are dragging down. In this case the steps are:
- entered the date 1 Jan 2024 in cell A4
- Hold the CTRL key down, clicked and dragged down on the bottom right fill handle