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!

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

169 answers

Anonymous

2018-09-12T21:40:11+00:00

Similar to Kevin, I normally have an extra blank tab open on many of my spreadsheets just to click back and forth when this issue occurs. For me, just clicking to a different tab and back gets the keyboard working again. Been doing this trick for over a year.

It would be nice to have a solution to this from Microsoft. There are times I toggle back and forth on tabs dozens of times when updating a single worksheet. Quite annoying!
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2018-09-10T14:24:35+00:00

So MS Excel is Faulty! it is driving me mad. MS please FIX this issue ASAP
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2018-09-03T12:24:11+00:00

Wow! So not even limited to the PC world, includes Mac's too... Certainly a core code issue then. Amazed too at the "reboot and try again" type replies from the Microsoft support staff. Well, "duh", of course rebooting will clear things 99.9% of the time, but does not FIX it.

I'm sure this is certainly not an easy fix, as it seems inconsistent, but to not even say "we're looking into it" or offer a debug/trace version to help try to track the issue is bad. If they offerered a debug version to the 50+ people who've commented here, I would hope they'd have enough log files to track it down and fix it!
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2018-09-03T11:46:04+00:00

You can also tell them to press "Enter" and Excel will automatically jump to one other already opened Excel file...and then you go back to the one you were working with. But this is not really a solution, it's a bypass.

One more thing, as I already wrote in June, I sent an official complaint to Microsoft, but so far, I have not received any reply. Not even a "Thank you for your email, we will get back to you" response.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2018-08-30T14:12:30+00:00
Have a solution !

Got the same issue on the Mac version 2016, very annoying and I've found an easy way to solve it:
- Open the file with OpenOffice
- Make a change in the file, any change and save.
- Re-open the file with Excel and... the issue is gone !
Thank you OpenOffice !

Hope this will help other people too.

Best Regards

Stéphane
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments