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

microsoft excelmicrosoft-excel-2007

Excel has an annoying habit of making the current selection invisible when it becomes inactive – including the "focused cell" rectangle. When I try to process a spreadsheet in a certain way I may put it on a secondary monitor and highlight the stuff I'm working with, but the moment I switch to another program (on the primary screen) I can no longer see where I was.

It must have made sense 10 years ago before lots of people had multiple monitors, but now it's just an annoyance. A quick google doesn't find anything at all on this.

Best Answer

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.

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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!

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Excel – How to move the selection down one row in Excel 2007

It sounds like you just need something like this:

Sub moveselection()

Selection.Offset(1, 0).Select

End Sub

This will move your selection one row down without changing the size of the selection.

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Related Solutions

Excel – Show cell selection in Excel when not in focus

Excel – How to move the selection down one row in Excel 2007

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