How to fill series in the column of excel after skipping the cell (s) which already have some text

Question

I want to fill series in a column and skip those cell which has some values (text).

In the attached screenshot, I want to fill series in the Student ID column. skip those cell which has already text or the row is merged and fill the series.

See the result I want:

Answer 1

You are not going to be able to copy a formula down in ColumnC (without deleting the name data) but could handle that with an IF statement in a helper column. Assuming you start with what is shown in ColumnC in the image, F2 (for example) could contain:

=IF(NOT(ISBLANK(C2)),C2,MAX(F$1:F1)+1)

which may be copied up one cell and down to suit.