Excel 2007, Undesired selection of multiple cells

I use Excel  2010 and noticed this same issue: click one box and several other boxes select.

F8 helped to a slight degree but didn't clear up my issue.

After reading someone's post regarding the zoom and noticed my view was set to 90%.

I set it to 100% and my issue disappeared.

Switched back to 90% and my selection problem came back.

Switched to 80%-no problem.

Back to 100%-no problem and finally back to 90% and the problem came back.

I found a solution!

If you click on a cell and it selects multiple cells (for me it was 4-5 cells below my selected cell), then right click on the cell selection, regardless of how many there are. Go to Format Cells. The last tab in the dialog box should be "Protection" click on it and un-select the "Locked" option box When you click OK, you can click on any of the cells you chose and it will only select that cell instead of multiple.

You may want to do this to all the cells in your worksheet so the problem doesn't continue to arise.

Yes, this works. It is a cell protection issue. When it occurs, right click in the group of cells, select 'Format Cells', select the far right tab 'Protection', then deselect 'Locked'. This unlocks cell protection.

I found that benzo95's throubleshooting was correct. If you are clicking on the last row or column of a page with the adjoining page showing, it will occur. Sometimes clicking in the footer does the same thing. Somehow these actions turn on cell protection and the cursor begins to select multiple cells. I noticed that if I had copied a group of cells and pasted it somewhere, and then later selected a single cell within those cells, it would begin, even if I had not merged those cells together but merely copied/pasted them as a group. Generally the size of the automatically selected group of cells was the same as the size of the cells I had copied/pasted together from somewhere else. In each case it only occured with cells that had formulas, so perhaps there is a cell protection issue that automatically arises with formulas in multiple cells copied as a group and then pasted to another location. Maybe it's only when you do this to the last line of a page.

Yes, changing layout or zoom can solve it temporarily, but the only way I was able to eliminate it was to deselect 'locked' cell protection and then stop selecting a cell in a copy/pasted group of cells with formulas.

I have experienced the same problem.  I changed my zoom level to 99% and the problem went away.  Crazy fix, but it did work.  Thanks!

Sorry I've had this happening since I bought office 2000, always used MS Works before that. Have had three versions since I think.

No probably no page layout view, or not called that, in older versions but will still have been a view to see what the printed page was like.

I always thought I was doing something wrong but when I started looking at forums, not just MS ones, then I found loads of other people with the same bug. All sorts of theories came along but no one has found a cure, just the get a-rounds.

As I said I'm not good at programming, I used to mess with basic on a BBC B but far cleverer people than me to do it so I let them.

All my sheets print out on a single A4, have ten or fifteen different sheets in a book, maybe a total of thirty or forty. I format it like that so I can navigate the book easy, keep meaning to make them into forms but never get round to it.

This single bug has been the worse thing for me over the years, always had it since 2000, you get multiple selection when you don't want it and it does make it impossible for me to use that sheet efficiently, just can't format without repeatedly testing print or page layout view.

For me it needs someone to sort out the code to get rid of the bug, the program costs enough and repeated new versions still have it. Just not acceptable from a big software company.

I'm looking at other programs, will try the open source office suite again and see if it's improved over the last couple of years.