What is the difference between auto complete and auto fill?

Answer 1

Autofit is usually used to adjust the size of something, like a column width in a spreadsheet, so that it can fit the values into it fully. Autofill is used to copy things, normally in a constant pattern, like copying a formula or putting in the days of the week or months of the year automatically, or putting in a set of numbers with an equal gap between them. If you open an Excel spreadsheet you can try the following examples.

In cell A1 type 5. In cell A2 type 10. Now select both cells. Click on the fill handle at the bottom corner of A2, and press and hold the mouse button and drag down. IF you do it right, when you stop 15 will be in A3, 20 in A4, 25 in A5 and so on.

Now type Sunday in B1. Put the cursor on B1 and click on the fill handle at the bottom corner of B1 and start to drag down. Monday will go into B2, Tuesday in B3, Wednesday into B4 and so on. You can do the same trick with months. Even if you just type the first 3 letters of a month or a day and drag down, it will put the first 3 letters of the subsequent months and days in the other cells. These are all examples of Autofill.

When you put some long piece of text into a cell, it normally seems to spill into the next cell. But if you then put something into the next cell, you will no longer see all of what you typed into the first one. Type a short sentence into cell D1, so that it spills over E1 and F1. Now type something into E1. You will no longer be able to see all the text that was in D1, just up to the edge of D1. Now put the cursor between the D at the very top of the Column D and the E at the top of Column E, right above the dividing line between D1 and E1. The cursor will change into having two arrows, one pointing left and the other to the right, with a vertical line in between them. When you get that, double click on the mouse. Column D will now widen out so that all of the text in D1 can be seen. That is Autofit.