Excel 2007, Undesired selection of multiple cells

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.

I must be on two threads with very similar names as I replied yesterday to this and now another email says I have a response but my last reply and it's related question is not on here. No one has yet found a fix, a solution, they are all a get-around. It happens through ALL versions of Excel! It is NOT related to hardware; mice etc! It ONLY happens in page layout view but you need to be in that to edit so you know what you are editing looks like and stays within the page! It is not because of an add-on as I don't use them, have everything I can switched off and stripped out! Sorry Adam but it is pretty universal and of long standing, I've had it since 2000. Over all those years I have looked on many forums as Microsoft do not care about their customers, leave us to struggle amongst ourselves so we all NEED to be reminding them as often as we can that they need us to buy their software, trouble is they are arrogant as there just is not another software company that gets anywhere near close to producing a whole set of software that is anywhere near integrated. They don't have it anywhere near perfect but are way out in front so far. Do a Google search on the problems and look at a few sites that come up, there will be tens of thousands of users have the problem from many years back until today. I'm no expert or I'd have found a fix and published it. I am convinced it's to do with keyboard shortcuts overlapping, at some point you hit keys in error or even correctly for you but the program accept them as a command. As I said not an expert or I'd get inside and look at the code which does that as a starting point. I've had a few versions of Excel, have used books from old versions in newer ones, if they have the bug operating in them it carries over. I have rebuilt whole book templates, nothing cut and pasted, all punched in, many hours of work, the bug has come back after a while. I have other books that have never had it. I'm a self employed electrician, use excel to produce my job sheets and test records, have a number of book templates for different types of job, many sheet templates. I work in page layout view all the time so I can modify a template individually to each job so it does not contain superfluous data and unfilled lines. This bug wakes up and it's ****, have to continually keep flicking between view to make sure the pages stay correct, will print properly. So anyone who reads this, hope it helps your problem a little but it won't be a cure, sorry. If you want to give a solution that will be great but please read all this thread and you will find many ways of getting around it, they have all been said. You just cannot modify cells in page layout if you have this bug, have to do that in normal view then keep checking on layout to see what it looks like, quickest way if you have much formatting to do.

I hate the way these forum threads work. I get an email to say there is a new post, click on the link but then have to sign in to post but then am not back on that thread in the right place. short term memory is bad so have to write things down if I need to, a real pain!!

I get an email via my account, click on a link from that mail so obviously I have an account so shouldn't need to sign in and lose that link. Computers are meant to help us be productive not give us more work to do!!!

My google search has reports going back to 2008-ish, not 2000,which makes sense, since it was a bug introduced in office 2007. Excel 2003 doesn't have a page layout view, hence no bug related to page layout view.

If you follow the steps I laid out earlier in this thread, you can cause the bug to present on a brand new, blank worksheet. Is it a fix? No, of course not. Is knowing what causes it, so you can avoid the bug better than re-writing whole workbooks, only to have the bug "come back" because you have a small part of the next page displaying on the screen? I'd argue yes.

To review, if you have the header showing on the next page (the page below the page you are working on) when you have excel in page layout mode, but none of the cells showing on said page, the bug presents. As soon as you expose on screen the top row of cells, by adjusting the size of the window, or the zoom, or whatever the bug does not present. I explain it more thoroughly in my previous post.

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.