Excel – Cursor and selection invisible when focus is lost

microsoft excel

When Excel window loses focus, the cursor becomes invisible. Also coloring of the respective column/row headers is back to default, so it's impossible to locate cursor and/or selection as soon as I switch to other window.

This annoys the hell out of me as it makes Excel almost unusable for most of tasks I need it for:

keeping track of test cases while performing testing in another window
obtaining data somewhere else and porting it to Excel

(I have never seen such behavior in other applications and can't even think of a justification for it.)

Is is possible to turn this behavior off, i.e. retain selection visibility when out of focus?

Edit: Contrary to what I thought when originally posted this, this is not a "new feature", it's rather a UI pragma that MS holds to in most their applications (at least since some point in time), although non-MS applications or some legacy MS applications do not always respect it.

Best Answer

One workaround is described in this post, which does not require usage of VBA/macros:

Copying content to the clipboard will put a dashed border around the highlighted cells, which will still remain when the Excel windows loses focus.

Highlight the concerned row by clicking the row number to the left of the row, then click Ctrl-C / Cmd-C.

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Excel – How to tell Excel not to hide selection when it becomes inactive

I have been annoyed by this for years. I've never found a solution within Excel. Is it an option to open your spreadsheet (at least for reading, if not editing) in OpenOffice.org Calc? It doesn't suffer the same problem.

Excel – Show cell selection in Excel when not in focus

I think there is a work around but, it really depends on your situation!

You can create a macro which fires when the selection changes and it simply changes the background of each cell. When you 'leave' the cell it will reset the row's background value to white and then select the new row.

I added this to my Sheet1 in the Visual Basic window.

Private Sub Worksheet_SelectionChange(ByVal Target As Range)
    Cells.Interior.ColorIndex = xlColorIndexNone
    ActiveCell.EntireRow.Interior.ColorIndex = 34
End Sub

This screen shot was taken while the application had lost focus.

This may be annoying but you could easily add a button which could toggle this feature on or off!

The negatives are (from top of my head : It will remove any current highlighting you have. So if you have highlighting on your page (cells coloured) then best not use this! Also, it will probably print with the highlighted rows!

enter image description here

Best Answer

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Excel – How to tell Excel not to hide selection when it becomes inactive

Excel – Show cell selection in Excel when not in focus

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