can not select certain cells in excel with mouse cursor or touchpad, but can navigate with arrow keys with speadsheet on onedrive.

Question

We have some spread sheets which we are unable to select certain cells with the mouse cursor. We can navigate to those cells with the arrow keys. There is a range of rows that we can't select. Rows 1-28 are fine, but then 29-42 are not selectable. 43 can be selected, but 44-73 are again not selectable with the mouse or touchpad. These speadsheets are stored on the OneDrive. If we copy the sheet locally, and open with the local copy of O365 Excel, we can select those cells, but the cursor shows as the large plus sign and not the normal pointer cursor. 

If anyone has any ideas on how to resolve this issue, it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi RuthWhitney,

I go through the post carefully. per your description, I think you may open the workbook in Excel for the web. And you cannot select some cells in it. if so, I would suggest you click “open in Desktop App” at top(I don’t know if you copy the sheet and open it in ), check if you can select these cells. As you can see in screenshot below:

 

 If you can’t, I would suggest you go to Review tab in Excel,  check if the sheet is protected, if it is protected, try to unprotect it.(sometimes you cannot select cells because is protected and is prevented from selecting some cells. For more information: Lock or unlock specific areas of a protected worksheet)

 

As for the “ large plus sign” it is an expected behavior when you edit workbook in Excel desktop app.

If suggestion above doesn’t help, could you please share information below with us for further troubleshooting?

1. How do you copy the sheet locally?
2. Does the same issue happen on other workbooks in OneDrive?
3. Could you please share some screenshots of the cells that cannot be selected?

Regards,

Clark

Answer 2

Hi RuthWhitney,

Have you checked information above? Welcome to post back if there are any updates.

Regards,

Clark

Answer 3

The problem disappeared the following day.