We give two formulas involving covering polynomials and use them to study projections C -> C*v for binary self-dual codes C and vectors v. The dimension of C*v is determined in terms of the weight of v and the number of codewords covered by v. These projections are very useful in the study of self-dual codes. An example is given proving some new properties of a doubly-even self-dual code with parameters [72, 36, 12].