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How to deselect cells in Microsoft Excel without starting over

Microsoft Excel is packed with productivity shortcuts 14 Tips to Save Time in Microsoft Excel 14 Tips to Save Time in Microsoft Excel If Microsoft Excel has eaten up a lot of your time in the past, let us show you how to get it back. These simple tips are easy to remember. Read more . For example, there are many ways to select cells, a range of cells, and even the entire spreadsheet.

But what do you do if you select a cell or area by mistake? There is no built in way to remove that from the selection without deselecting the entire selection and starting over.

That is, until now. In this post, we'll show you how to get started with the new Deselect feature in Microsoft Excel that solves that exact problem.

How to deselect cells in Microsoft Excel

Selecting too many cells or highlighting the wrong range of cells is an easy mistake to make in Excel, and it's both frustrating and time consuming. That's why Microsoft Excel introduced the Deselect tool. As of this writing, this feature is only available to Office 365 subscribers.

Here's how you can deselect cells within a range of cells that are highlighted in three quick steps.

  1. Hold Ctrl key.
  2. Click to deselect any cell or click and drag to deselect a range of cells within a selection.
  3. To reselect any of those cells, hold down the Ctrl key again and reselect those cells.

How to deselect cells in Microsoft Excel without starting over

Note that if a worksheet is protected, you won't be able to select the cells or their contents. Also, the way to select cells has not changed.

To select a range of contiguous cells: Click in the first cell of the range and then drag to the last cell. Alternatively, press and hold Shift and use the arrow keys to expand the selection..

To select a group of discontiguous cells: Select the first cell or range of cells, and then press Ctrl While selecting the other cells or ranges.

Now, thanks to the Unselect function, you don't have to cancel the entire selection if you don't select the right cells. Upgrade to the latest version of Office 365 and try this feature today.