There’s nothing more infuriating in Microsoft Excel than when you’ve spent a while carefully highlighting a broad selection of cells, only to find you’ve highlighted a few too many, or accidentally included cells in the middle of your selection which you didn’t mean to.
Learning how to deselect cells in Excel is your ticket to quickly correcting these errors, and making future selections all the more accurate.
To learn how to deselect in Excel, simply follow our tutorials below. For all other queries, or if you’d like more information on the subject, check out our FAQ section at the end of this article.
Table of Contents
How to deselect individual cells in Microsoft Excel
- Open the Microsoft Excel program on your preferred device, and load the document you’re currently working on. Alternatively, load a test document to practice on.
- First, select a range of cells by left-clicking on the first cell and dragging to complete your selection. Alternatively, use CTRL + A to select all cells, or hold CTRL on your keyboard and left-click individual cells to select a range of non-contiguous cells.
- Now, to deselect individual cells from this selection, you first need to press and hold the CTRL button on your keyboard
- Next, with CTRL held down, left-click each cell you wish to remove from your selection
- Once you’ve successfully deselected all of the cells you wanted to, simply let go of the CTRL key.
How to deselect whole rows and columns in Microsoft Excel
- Open the Microsoft Excel program on your preferred device, and load the document you’re currently working on. Alternatively, load a test document to practice on.
- First, select a range of cells by left-clicking on the first cell and dragging to complete your selection. Alternatively, use CTRL + A to select all cells, or hold CTRL on your keyboard and left-click individual cells to select a range of non-contiguous cells.
- Now, to deselect whole rows and/or columns from this selection, you first need to press and hold the CTRL button on your keyboard
- Next, with CTRL held down, double-click (double-left-click) the letter(s) or number(s) of the column(s) or row(s) you wish to deselect.
- Once you’ve successfully deselected all of the rows and columns you wanted to, simply let go of the CTRL key.
And there you have it! That’s all you need to know to deselect accidentally-selected cells in Microsoft Excel. If you have other questions or would like a little more information on the subject, please refer to our FAQs below.
FAQs
What does deselecting in Microsoft Excel mean?
Microsoft Excel is one of the world’s most commonly used spreadsheet programs, forming an integral part of the financial and accountancy sectors, HR departments, and even personal organization. It is a program that allows you to create a range of spreadsheets in a workbook, comprising hundreds of individual cells.
Usually, you would populate these various cells, rows, and columns with data pertaining to something you’re working on or filing. When it comes to accessing and utilizing that data at a later stage, one of the handiest functions Microsoft Excel offers you is the ability to highlight various cells in order to perform actions on them.
Deselecting cells refers to the process by which, having highlighted a range of cells, you would then go about deselecting a few of them, as per your needs. It wasn’t always a possibility with Microsoft Excel, however, and is in fact a rather new feature of the most recent versions of the software. So, if you’re here to learn how to deselect cells, you can count yourself lucky!
Why would I want to deselect in Microsoft Excel?
Imagine you’ve decided to highlight a range of data, but you’ve accidentally highlighted one row too many. You could, naturally, just start again. But, then, why should you? Starting again every time you accidentally highlight one cell, row, or column too many is a laborious process and a waste of your (valuable) time.
Instead, you can now simply deselect the accidentally-selected cells, cleaning up any errors, and ultimately ensuring that you are as accurate as possible with your use of Excel as you can be.
Deselecting cells comes in most handy when you’ve spent time carefully curating a selection of cells set across a broad range, but perhaps not continuous (i.e. backing onto each other, or all in the same row or column). Alternatively, perhaps you need to select columns 1-4 and 6-8, but not 5. How would you do this?
Both of these situations are ones in which deselecting cells can make the whole process a cakewalk. To learn how, simply follow our tutorials above!
Can I re-select after deselecting in Microsoft Excel?
Yes, absolutely you can re-select cells you’ve deselected in Microsoft Excel. The process is super simple and uses exactly the same technique you used to deselect the cells in the first place. Holding CTRL on your keyboard, click the cells you wish to re-select, or click and drag to reselect a selection.
To reselect a specific row or column, simply double-left-click (whilst still holding CTRL on your keyboard) on that row or column’s number or letter, and you’ll see all of the cells in said line re-highlighted, indicating their selection.
