Blog Post

Excel Blog
1 MIN READ

How to deselect cells from selected ranges in Excel

Olaf Hubel's avatar
Olaf Hubel
Former Employee
Jan 23, 2018

We are excited to announce that Excel now lets you deselect cells or a range from your current selection. This was one of the top request we got from our community and we are happy to announce we have rolled it out for PC and Mac subscription users of Office 365.  

 

How to unselect a cell from a selection

To unselect a selected cell hold down the CTRL (or Command on mac) key and click on the cells you want to deselect. To unselect a range of selected cells hold down the CTRL (or Command for Mac) key and drag the range you want to deselect, starting from within a selected range.

 

Deselect a selected cell in Excel

How to multi select cells or ranges

This has not changed, you can still use the CTRL (or Command on Mac) key to click on an unselected cell to select it. To select an additional range simple use the CTRL (or Command on mac), starting on a unselected cells and drag the mouse to select the range.

 

Select multiple cells or ranges in Excel

 

Published Jan 23, 2018
Version 1.0

36 Comments

  • Olaf Hubel's avatar
    Olaf Hubel
    Former Employee

    Hi, JC Kim, sorry this is a 2016 subscription or later feature. 

     

    These updates are available as part of an https://products.office.com/en-us/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, https://support.office.com/en-us/article/How-do-I-get-the-newest-features-in-Office-2016-for-Office-365-da36192c-58b9-4bc9-8d51-bb6eed468516.

     

  • JC Kim's avatar
    JC Kim
    Copper Contributor

    Dear Mr. Hubel,

    It will be appriciated if you let me know that is there any plan to update this feature (deselect) to Excel 2013.

  • Olaf Hubel's avatar
    Olaf Hubel
    Former Employee

    Hi Phillip Perin,

    Can you give me some more background why you wanted to select a range within a range. I understand what you expected to happen based on your image. But like to learn more about what you where trying to do. 

     

    Thanks,

    Olaf

  • Phillip Perin's avatar
    Phillip Perin
    Copper Contributor

    Hello Olaf Hubel,

     

    Serious question, how'd you guys **bleep** this up? I cannot select ranges within my original selection as subgroups without **bleep**ing everything up. You took a community request to deselect cells and **bleep**ed up the already working multi-select.

     

    Here is what happens when I use your new multi-select function as it is changed because of how you chose to implement your "deselect"

     

    https://imgur.com/a/G9t6l

  • Olaf Hubel's avatar
    Olaf Hubel
    Former Employee

    These updates are available as part of an https://products.office.com/en-us/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, https://support.office.com/en-us/article/How-do-I-get-the-newest-features-in-Office-2016-for-Office-365-da36192c-58b9-4bc9-8d51-bb6eed468516.