Click on one cell - Excel then selects many cells

Hello everyone, just wondering if anyone can help...

There seems to be a years-old bug in Excel (many online posts refer to it, in successive versions going back to Excel 2007) whereby Excel selects multiple cells instead of one, when trying to select a new, single, target cell (or, sometimes, range).

From my experiments, the bug seems to be triggered somewhat randomly when the number of rows in a worksheet exceeds what can be displayed in a single screenful, and when Freeze Panes is on. It has nothing to do with whether Extend mode (F8) or Add/Remove mode (Shift F8) are on or off.

I'm attaching a small Excel workbook which I hope will demonstrate to anyone who's interested (Microsoft...????) an example of similar, probably related, and equally unexpected selection-change behaviour. In this workbook I suggest using Shift+PageDown which seems to fairly reliably show the bugginess in changing selection with extensive lists and frozen panes... at least it does on my system*. When the bug occurs it sometimes also seems to disable the operation of Shift+PageUp.

I've found this type of buggy behaviour in Excel 2019 and 2021, and to some extent in Microsoft 365.

The attached workbook was created in Excel 2021 and exhibits the bug in slightly different, but always unexpected, ways when opened and used in each of the above three Excel versions.

Excel single cell click, multiple cell selection - experiments.xlsx

If anyone knows why this happens or knows of a cure for it, that would be very interesting.

*HP laptop, 2020 vintage, Ryzen 5, Windows 11, Microsoft Office 2021

Hi Carim,

Thank you for your suggestion, but that is not the reason, as stated in my original post ("...It has nothing to do with whether Extend mode (F8) or Add/Remove mode (Shift F8) are on or off...").

The bug (try the workbook I attached in my post) presents itself without activating either Extend Selection or Add or Remove Selection modes.

Hi Carim,

1. Many thanks, again, for your willingness to help, and your time and effort in looking at this.

2. Unfortunately, having -- at your suggestion -- tried both repairing and reinstalling Office 2021, using the Microsoft tools you pointed out, the behaviour remains unchanged, with the problem continuing to manifest itself on my installation.

3. Sometimes just a single click on the orange cell in my demonstration workbook (as well as different cells in other workbooks of similar general structure) will cause a selection of several cells to appear; sometimes it will behave as expected and select just the one intended cell. Using the Shift+PageDown method described in the workbook will always produce an "upwards selection" instead of the expected downwards one.

4. I also tried uploading and converting my demonstration file to Google Sheets, and then exporting it from Sheets as a new, Excel format file, in the hope that that might remove any possible file corruption. But after opening that version in Excel, the problem still remained.

5. Thinking that In case it could possibly be a mouse problem, I also tried an entirely different make and type of mouse (cable connected rather than wireless). But that made no difference either: the problem was still evident. Using the touchpad rather than a mouse usually produced a briefly extended selection which would then revert, by itself, to the single target cell.

6. I suppose it is still possible that this might be mouse-driver-related rather than Excel-related, but I can only use the mouse drivers that are right for my system, so I think that question remains open.

7. I think I'll just have to live with it. Using Ctrl+G to go to the intended cell address is a possible, but cumbersome, workaround.

8. It's clear that other people do encounter this problem, as evidenced by the links below.

a: https://www.quora.com/Why-does…150615&target_type=answer

b: https://www.mrexcel.com/board/…ultiple-cells-bug.693868/

c: https://answers.microsoft.com/…73-452f-ac21-6c8bf19afcfc

To conclude: thank you once again, Carim, for your helpfulness.

Patrick

Hi Pecoflyer,

Thank you for your suggestion.

Unfortunately, the DisableHardwareAcceleration option seems to have been removed from the relevant Options area in the Excel 2021 I'm using, so I can't try it. I've also searched the Registry for it and it doesn't seem to be there either.

Thanks for trying to help!

Hi Carim et al,

No, it's not a sticky keys thing... I've tried disabling, enabling, disabling, and leaving it disabled. It's not that.

Hi all,

Thank you all for your further suggestions. I will be experimenting with them in the next few days and will report back.

As an aside, for some reason I don't understand, I am not getting emails to say that someone has posted something new to this thread, even though I am "subscribed" to it, and the "Watch thread" box is ticked. There are no related emails in my spam folder. My account settings on this forum have "Yes" for "Automatically watch threads when I have replied to them". Any suggestions as to why I might not be receiving email notifications for new posts and replies would be welcome -- thank you in anticipation.

Pending my further tests, brief answers to recent responses

(and thank you for those):

Rory: I work in Normal view.

Carim (Very eager...): so am I...

Pecoflyer (adding DWORD): yes, and I will be trying this soon.

Hi people,

Just to bring this episode to a (somewhat unsatisfactory) close: I tried all suggestions, to no avail.

Then suddenly, a couple of weeks or so ago, things started working normally, as you'd expect them to, without any problems of the kind that previously existed. I hesitated to report it in case it was just a temporary thing, but the now-correct operation seems to have remained in place.

Whether this is due to some automatic, bug-fixing, online update of Excel 2021, or Windows 11, or the mouse driver, or all of these, I can't say, but that would be my suspicion at this point.

So I thank you all for your interest in this case, and your advice and assistance. There's simply, now, no fault, any more.

Wishing you all a great New Year.