Excel 2007, Undesired selection of multiple cells

Anonymous
2010-07-20T19:01:58+00:00

I am using excel 2007, on occasion when i try to select any one cell it will highlight and select multiple cells. Once this occurs it happens with every cell I click on.

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Anonymous
2010-07-29T19:22:04+00:00

I have heard, but cannot confirm, that some people with this problem have found that altering the zoom level (slider in lower right corner of Excel window) gets the multiple seelction to go away

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-12-18T17:32:38+00:00

    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!

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-12-24T18:29:43+00:00

    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.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-12-26T18:39:43+00:00

    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.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-01-07T02:41:40+00:00

    I don't use Excel very often but I also started having this problem. I just started looking into forums about it and most of them are about 2007. I am using 2010. I see some a lot of things in these forums that I am experiencing. I would like to add that if this happens in a cell with a continuing formula in it, and I shrink it down to one cell by garbing the bottom corner and sliding it up, I end up losing my formula.

    I would like to echo Stuatwork's last comment "When is Microsoft going to correct this?" Please note the dates on these two post. It hasn't happened in over three years!

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