Forum Discussion
Enter, in text box
dan_schlesinger4567 I'm kind of with mathetes on this one, to the extent that I've never heard of it being an issue in my 20+ years of working with Excel. I had no idea the Enter key will perform the Paste command when in CutCopyMode. I supposed it's because of the keyboard shortcuts I've grown accustomed to:
- Ctrl+X to Cut --> Ctrl+V to Paste
- Ctrl+C to Copy --> Ctrl+Alt+V to open the Paste Special dialog box
- Esc to exit CutCopyMode
Also, I don't navigate the spreadsheet using the Enter key, so I never discovered this little tidbit before. I can see, though, how it would be an issue within a textbox, as the natural way to start a new line is to press the Enter key; and, if you forget to press the Esc key to exit CutCopyMode before editing a textbox, the problem occurs. However, I did notice in my ten minutes of testing that pressing Shift+Enter within a textbox will also start a new line but will bypass the Paste command. I don't suppose this is a keyboard habit you wish to develop at this stage, nor would recommending that you always press the Esc key before editing a textbox, so I'm not going to offer either as a suggested solution, but rather, just something to be aware of.
Having said all that, I did a quick internet search and could not find a way to disable this behavior from within Excel. However, in an old Microsoft support thread in which the exact same problem was described, some users who actually wanted this behavior to occur claimed that it all of a sudden stopped working. The reason, they discovered, was because they had third-party clipboard managers installed that were interfering with Excels clipboard management. The two apps mentioned in the thread were Ditto and Clipdiary. Now, I'm not about to test either of these apps personally, nor would I recommend that you do either without carefully researching them first. If you wish to try either one, please do so at your own risk.
For more information, please see: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/disable-pasting-when-enter-is-pressed-in-excel...
Here is the resproducible:
0 - Create a Text box
1 - Highlight and copy 100,000 rows
2 - go into a text box and hit return.
This is something that is tough to avoid.
On the contrary. I've been using spreadsheets for around forty years. Have never had occasion to do what you're describing. In other words, it's something that's very easy to avoid.
Hence my first set of questions to you:
- What is the context in which this is a necessary sequence of steps?
- What's the functional purpose being served that calls for doing those steps?
- Or any other question that gets at why this is a problem that is worth attention.
Agreed, I've been using Excel since the early 90's and just today, for the very first time, I hit enter in an Excel spreadsheet and it's suddenly pasting text in to a cell instead of moving over a cell. Like you I didn't even know this was a function. So, it is very easy to avoid.
Now, the question is, how to turn off this (censored) annoyance? It's definitely causing problems for me because, to clarify, normalcy is NOT pasting anything when hitting enter. I don't want this and it needs to stop.