Dear Analyst # 110: A tutorial on how to fill values down with Excel VBA and Google Apps Script (Vancouver Power BI/Modern Excel re-broadcast)

Have you ever faced a spreadsheet where one column contains values for each “section” of the spreadsheet but you want to fill those values down through the rest of the column? This is a common problem when you get a data dump from a database or perhaps a copy/paste from a PivotTable. You have values interspersed in the column and want to fill the empty cells below those values with the value above it, but not all the way down. See this screenshot below to see what I mean:

This episode is a re-broadcast of a presentation I gave at the Vancouver Power BI & Modern Excel User Group in April 2021 hosted by Ken Puls. The full video of the presentation is below where I walk through two scripts: a VBA script for Excel an a Google Apps Script for Google Sheets. You can see the original episode/post I did about filling values down programmatically in episode #42. Filling values down is apparently a really common operation and problem faced by analysts because this post about filling values down to the last row of data has become the most popular post on my blog.