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

Anonymous
2017-04-14T07:08:05+00:00

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!

P.

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-07-09T19:29:06+00:00

    I have been having the same problem with greater and greater frequency.  It may happen to almost every cell that I try to type in and so is very time-consuming to constantly be going over to another sheet or opening another spreadsheet by clicking enter. These are just not acceptable workarounds to this terrible glitch.  This is really beyond annoying.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-07-06T17:23:16+00:00

    Has anyone tried turning off Autosave to see if it still has the problem where you can't type in the cells?  Maybe when it autosaves it ends up pointing to the wrong Excel workbook as the active one.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-07-04T19:43:26+00:00

    After reading your post about hitting <Enter> , I tried that and yes... it opened another Excel file that was already open in front of the one I was using.  Then, when I returend to the original, I was able to type.  Additionally, while I could not type, I could click in cells with the mouse, but I could NOT move on the screen by using the mouse scrollwheel (or keyboard arrows).

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-07-04T19:41:52+00:00

    No, it just happened to me in a file that I created a few minutes ago.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-06-30T20:40:21+00:00

    This is what I have to do, too. But it literally happens hundreds of times in an 8 hour day and it slows productivity way down. Not to mention how very frustrating it is. The only time it doesn't happen is if I only have one excel file open. That doesn't work for me.

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