Merging cells and using the fill handle to copy the merge in subsequent...

Question

My problem can be best illustrated by me by explaining how I could achieve it in Excel.
In Excel, this is how it would be done for example:
I select two horizontal cells and click on the merge button to merge them. They are now one cell, with the fill handle (small circle) on the bottom right corner. Clicking on that circle and dragging it down will merge both cells in each row into a single cell. i.e. each subsequent row will look like the row above until I stop dragging.
How can I do this in Numbers. Obviously I don't want both columns to become one wider column, but just a certain selection of rows within the two columns.

Answer 1

doktor_florian wrote:
Either this answer does not have anything to do with the original question or I just don't get the link.
If I select 20 rows with two columns and press "merge" I get one cell with the content of 20 rows. This is utterly useless.
Hi,
1.) I think you do not entirely understand my poing. Unfortunately, I cannot upload images of what I am trying to illustrate in words.
I am not trying to merge 2 columns and their 20 rows into one cell. What I want to do is to merge two cells horizontally.
Open Numbers and open a blank spread sheet. You have numerous columns and rows, but for simplicity, concentrate on columns A and B and rows 1-5.
The illustrations below show what it is I want to achieve. You start of with (1), two columns with 5 rows making a total of 10 cells. For what ever reasons, I need to merge the 2nd row (A2+B2) into a single cell. I select them, click on merge and that's it. [Illustration (2)] However, I also need the 2nd and 3rd row merged. In Excel. I would click on the bottom-right corner of the 2nd row which was recently merged and drag down. This would copy the merged cell onto the rows below and the result is shown in illustration (3). Now, I could just repeat the procedure that I did the first time I merged the two cells in row 2, but imagine if you need to do this for 10 or 20 rows. That's extremely time consuming and certainly there must be an easier way.
(1) (2) (3)
A B A B A B
1 l___l___l 1 l___l___l 1 l___l___l
2 l___l___l 2 l_______l 2 l_______l
3 l___l___l 3 l___l___l 3 l_______l
4 l___l___l 4 l___l___l 4 l_______l
5 l___l___l 5 l___l___l 5 l___l___l
2.) +"If I select 20 rows with two columns and press "merge" I get one cell with the content of 20 rows. This is utterly useless."+
I think this is a very patronizing comment. How can you know what needs I or other Numbers users have? Perhaps it is very useless to you, in which case you should have said so, but it is not objectively useless.
P.S. I apology for the messiness of the illustrations. It's the best I can do.