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In a Google Spreadsheet, I put in the following numbers in a column, each line is an entry in the column.

100 
100*1.01
100*1.01^2
100*1.01^3

The highest exponent of 1.01 is 3 for now. But I would like to keep filling this column until the exponent of 1.01 is 30. I can only do it by filling each entry in the column manually. How can I do this easier?

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Introduce the POWER function and use the ROW function to increment the exponent. Your second line would be,

=100*power(1.01, row(1:1))

Fill down and the ROW(1:1) will increment as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc..

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    Add this to your first line and you won't have to drag down: =ARRAYFORMULA(100 * POWER(1.01, ROW(C1:C4)-1)) – Jacob Jan Tuinstra May 14 '15 at 19:12
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    @JacobJanTuinstra -Good point. I had been thinking about the use of x⁰ always equalling 1 regardless of the value of x but decided to take a more brick-by-brick approach. It would have made the formula a single one rather than different from A1 to A2 but I thought I might have a bit more obvious clarity with the verbose approach. – user82329 May 14 '15 at 19:19
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After entering 100 into one cell (say, A2), I would put the following into A3: =A2*1.01, and drag down this formula to fill more cells in the A column.

(Although row() could be used for this, I prefer not to use it in formulas, to avoid them breaking when I add or remove the header row, etc.)

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  • Thank you for the answer. Your solution also works. But I actually like the row solution because the row index also tells me the exponent value while the cell index may not because my header row is not always 1 – drdot May 9 '15 at 19:51

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