Unable to deselect in excel

This is a feature that's always been apart of Excel.

They disabled it in 2016, making it just darken the cell selection until it turns completely black, which has no useful functionality whatsoever, just to do something with the ctrl+click function they purposely removed.

It was removed to force people to downgrade from 2016 professional to the Office 365 spyware which collects your data and uploads everything to their servers, or else force you to pay for Office 2019 professional, which has the same Office365 functionality & Licensing permissions built in.

Its highly unscrupulous and dishonest, but is most definitely par for the course for Microsoft since their Windows 10 NSAshareware.

It's akin to making your right mouse button put a big red blob on your document unless you pay Microsoft more money to remove it.

On the Bright side, both Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice are both developing rather nicely, and have become quite robust & highly viable Microsoft product replacements.

If you are using Office365, you may as well just switch over to GoogleOffice at this point, at least they're transparent with their data & intellectual property theft.

Is it more likely that Microsoft has just run out of ideas to entice you to upgrade to 2019, so they just break basic existing functionality?

Or is it more likely that they are as desperate for everyone to get on Office365 as they are to get everyone on Windows10, and NEED you off of the legacy ware because they need your information, because they've become mere mass data-collection spyware jointly operated with the NSA.

They've already done with Windows 10 what Apple did long ago for the NSA with their OS's. They've also long been attempting to turn to a Google model of selling User Psychographic data for profits.

Google Drive is set up with similar carefully programmed shenanigans which simply expose all your data to nearly anyone, which makes it ok for them to use it themselves and give the NSA backdoors to your information as well. 

and getting you on Office365 is as integral to their schemes as getting you on Windows10 was. 

I was on the phone with Microsoft Support for 3 straight weeks, most of the day, most of the week, trying to get them to stop secretly upgrading my Office 2019 Professional Plus license to a join Office 365 one they didn't think I'd notice. After 3 weeks and 20 different scorched earth fresh installs, and after reaching the very top echelon of the Tech Support elite levels that they won't even admit exists, and after those elite top techs started poking around and asking questions across teams, I was immediately dropped without a word. And I posed this scenario to them as well. For sure this is exactly what is happening.