Thursday 29 January 2015

Workaround for Excel's bug with too many cells selected

Sometimes you may find that Excel selects too many cells for you when you click in one cell and get several cells selected at once. After some research, I can confirm that it's quite repeatable and there are various ways to avoid Excel selecting too many cells at once.

The problem only occurs in Page View (not Normal View) and when the "White Space" (between the pages) is at the bottom of the window, with none of the cells of the next page visible.

So to get back to a single click selecting just one cell, you have a few options :

  • Change view back to Normal View
  • Zoom in/out or scroll, so that the White Space isn't in the screen's problem area
  • Right-click instead - this always selects a single cell, but you'll need to then press Esc to dismiss the options, leaving the cell selected.Only a solution for a single cell selection, obviously - not so useful if you really want several specific cells selected without Excel giving you even more!
  • Click on the grey space between pages and select the option to "Hide White Space". Your view of the pages will change somewhat - it's more of a grid and the pages don't look like real pages without the margins. But, if you can get used to it, the cell selection bug will have gone away.

Please leave a message if this helps!