Excel: Clicking in one cell annoyingly highlights several cells

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In some of my Excel 2010 workbooks (and in some of my wife’s), when I click on a cell to enter data or to drag its contents elsewhere, Excel annoyingly highlights several cells, usually cells below the originally selected cell. While holding down on the clicker, if I move the cursor up to above the cell, the multiple highlighting reduces until, maybe 2-3 cells above the target cell, I’m finally highlighting just the one cell. Note that now the cursor is, however, several cells higher. Why is this happening and how do I fix it. (I note that I tried Excel repair from the MS CD, and it fails. I use MS Office Professional 2010.)

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Are the cells merged?
Steve

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Just a remote possibility that it may be more of a hardware issue….Make sure that ClickLock (If available) is not enabled for your mouse in control panel>Mouse>buttons tab. Is the problem reproducible if you open the same workbooks on another computer or if you use a different mouse? If laptop, try decreasing the sensitivity of the touch pad. You may be unintentionally dragging while you are clicking.

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This issue has been around for some years, and seems to be connected with using the Page Layout view – switch to the normal layout and it goes away.

Alternatively I’ve heard that pressing F8 twice (its a toggle key in Excel) make effect a temporary cure if you really need to stay in the Page Layout view..

HTH

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Thank you. I will try this.

For others that asked questions in order to help:
1. I do not have ClickLock (which is available) selected for my mouse
2. I have no merged cells. (An aside: I almost never merge cells, preferring center-across-selection immeasurably.)
3. I am using a desktop.

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I just looked this problem up today – but a work around I found was altering the zoom size in the lower right of the spreadsheet. Making it smaller fixed my issue… However zooming it larger only exacerbated the issue. Also I’m reading F8 temporarily “fixes” the issue.

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That’s good to know, Martin

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It was there in Excel 2007 and is still there in 2010 but only happens rarely in specific files. Must be something fundamental or it would have been fixed.

It isn’t a hardware issue, it travels with the file, but I’ve never found a proper explanation – just workarounds.

We 2003 stalwarts are immune

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Hi
It sounds to me as if you have (inadvertently) activated “Extend Mode” in excel.
This is done by pressing “F8”. Having done so the selection is extended to the next cell you click on.
Look that the status bar at bottom left of screen.

42212-PaulHBS_extend

You turn off “extend Mode” by either

[*]pressing F8 again or
[*]pressing F9

F8, right arrow, right arrow will select the current cell and the next two to right.
F8 is an alternate manner to using shift and arrows or Shift + Click to extend the selection.
We used to teach these keyboard alternatives because this gave more control when selecting cells close to screen boundaries.

Hope it helps
Geof

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Hi Geof

I totally agree with you.

..we used to call this the ‘ScrollLock’ annoyance (when keyboards had a ‘ScrollLock’ key)

zeddy

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Hi Zeddy

I was surprised to read that some thought it was associated with layout and pagebreak views. I don’t recall that but I cant refute it either.

As far as I can remember extend mode was there forever.

Off topic …
Something similar in Word with F8 key. Multiple successive presses select current word, sentence, paragraph and document.
F9 to toggle extend mode off.

You need to modify the status bar to view the mode.

Cheers
Geof

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The issue described is a bug that has been reported several times (but is hard to pin down). It is not related to Extended mode, and only seems to occur in Page Layout view.

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Hi rory

..I too was unaware of this reported bug

zeddy

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