Excel 2016 - Cannot type anything into a cell all of a sudden

Anonymous

Hi,

I am experiencing a problem with Excel 2016 that is really frustrating.

I am working normally in excel 2016, when all of a sudden I cannot type anything into a cell. If I press Ecs nothing happens. I do not have macros, nor protected sheet or cells. I am working with multiple (2 or more) open excel files at the same time. I tried to figure out, if I press some combination of keys that would cause this, but found nothing. I, however, can move the mouse over the sheet and click different cells. I think the arrow keys work as well.

The strange thing that always "solves" the problem is pressing Enter. Pressing the Enter opens another Excel file that is already opened, and after simply going back to the first one, I then can work on normally. This can occur once, twice but sometimes even 10-times in a single day! Just terrible.

This is time demanding, many times I write into a cell and then see that the cell is still blank, I press the enter to make it work again, going back... - I cannot work like this.

When I was working with the same files in Excel 2013 and 2010 I hadn't have experienced such problems.

I already read some other forums with people experiencing the same problem, but haven't found any solution yet.

Do you have any?

Thank you!

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169 answers

Anonymous

2018-04-10T12:27:15+00:00

Brand new computer way more memory than I need and 5 or 6 application open at a time. I am running an I7 7700 with 8 GB of Ram so I do not think any of those things are my problem. Especially for a program like excel. No games, no resource intensive applications. Thanks for trying.
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Anonymous

2018-04-09T23:27:59+00:00

How much memory do you have in your machine?

How many other applications are open?

How many browser windows are you running?

Are you disk, memory, or otherwise resource consrained?
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Anonymous

2018-03-26T16:30:38+00:00

I have been having the same problem with MS Excel 2016 ( on MS Office 365 Business) for the past 6 months and it is becoming more frequent. Working in excel and then all the sudden I cannot enter anything into a cell. I can click on cell, highlight and drag down the screen. However I cannot use the scroll bar. Brand new Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop with Windows 10 and this is my problem.

My problem is I can't type so usually find out the problem too late. My solution has been click add sheet or go to another excel file and the problem goes away but comes back again.

VERY annoying and I could be wrong but it seems the updates in Windows is making the problem worse but I cannot say for sure. Yes I have uninstalled and installed and it still did not fix the problem.

Wow... That is exactly my experience and my frustration.

This is a relatively new PC, with a fresh copy of Office 2016. I can go days without experiencing the problem, and then have periods of time when it's almost constant. When it get's bad, I'll close all spreadsheets and try rebooting the PC. This will resolve the issue temporarily. I can also say that it happens to other users, but not all users, in my department. Although the sample size is low, so far it's only those running Office 2016 on Win10. But it does seem like this easily dates back to Office 2013 at the very least.
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Anonymous

2018-03-22T13:19:29+00:00

We are having the same problem here. Suddenly can't type in cells. Same scenario as described in all previous messages here.
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Anonymous

2018-03-17T06:29:55+00:00

Yes, we're also and still experiencing this kind of issue, and the problem is that, there is no any error messages.

Please find the solotion.
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