Saturday, January 29, 2005

Changes to selecting all cells in Excel 2003 from previous versions

CTRL A is the shortcut (common across most Microsoft Products) for selecting all. In an excel spreadsheet it selects all the cells in the sheet. (All 16,777,216 of them!)
However there has been a slight change in Excel 2003 from previous versions as to how this works. Now it is a two step process. The first time you select CTRL A it will select the current region (which may be the entire sheet) and the second time you press CTRL A you will get the entire sheet. This can be a trap for the unwary if you are used to using the shortcut without looking at the screen.
If there is no data in the sheet then CTRL A will get the entire sheet and if the selected cell(s) is not adjacent to or inside any regions (cells with data in them) then you will also get the whole sheet first time.
The other method of selecting the entire sheet by clicking the box left of column A and above Row 1 still works as before.


Posted by: Jethro | 11:42 PM |