Excel 2004 for Mac: deselecting multiple cells

[uticaky]

I'm not able to deselect multiple cells within a group of selected
cells. Command-clicking only deselects one cell, but that cell becomes
selected again when I try to deselect another cell. Any thoughts on
what is going on? I have quite a bit of experience using excel on
Windows computers. Running Excel 2004 on iMac, OS X 10.5.1.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I'm not able to deselect multiple cells within a group of selected
cells. Command-clicking only deselects one cell, but that cell becomes
selected again when I try to deselect another cell. Any thoughts on
what is going on? I have quite a bit of experience using excel on
Windows computers. Running Excel 2004 on iMac, OS X 10.5.1.

Selection is a additive process - you can add to a selection, but you
can't subtract (i.e, "deselect") from it.

This is true for all versions of both Mac and WinXL. What you're doing
when you CMD-Click is (temporarily) adding the cell you click on to the
selection. For instance, if you have A1:J10 selected, and CMD-click on
cell D5, then, in the Immediate Window of the Visual Basic Editor,
you'll get this result (when you enter the first line):

Debug.Print Selection.Address
$A$1:$J$10,$D$5

If you CMD-click on a new cell, that second Area ($D$5) will change to
the new cell, but $D$5 will still be within the first Area of the
Selection.

If you want to be able to "deselect", you can use a macro to do so - see
here for one by Chip Pearson:

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/unselect.htm