Google-sheets – How to keep borders when dragging down to fill cells

formattinggoogle sheetsgoogle-sheets-cell-format

I have a large scheduling spreadsheet of dates and names, split up by week, with borders for clarity. I want to be able to autofill the dates by dragging down the cell. Sometimes I also want to fill many cells with the same name in a row. If I drag down to fill the cells, then any borders on the cell are erased, like so:

enter image description here

(I already manually fixed the borders on the dates when i took the screnshot.) Borders are apparently treated like they're part of the content of the cell, which seems completely wild to me. Borders are outside of the cell and I'd expect them to stay where I put them no matter what content I post or move around in the cells themselves

Is there a way to get borders to just stick where they're set and ignore any dragging, copy/pasting, etc. that I'm doing? Failing that, is there at least a fix for the specific trouble I'm seeing here with the drag-down?

Best Answer

Here's a way to auto fill dates without erasing border format :

Cell A1

1/1/2016

Cell A2

=ArrayFormula(ADD(A1,row(INDIRECT("A1:A"&30))))

Credit goes to Rubén

For the 'name' column you can copy a the cell Claire for example then select the range where you need the name then paste values only. Shortcuts are CTRL+C -> CTRL+SHIFT+V

Normal behavior when you drag a cell is to copy format.

More : If you have this problem with only 2 columns, you can drag, copy paste, and make wathever you need. Then just copy - paste format of another column using this tool enter image description here

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