How to Deselect Cells in Excel Without Restarting (2024)

Selecting cells, rows, columns, or even the entire spreadsheet is easy. But there are times when you accidentally select one or more cells you don’t need.

Is there a way to deselect cells without having to lose your current selection? 🤔

The answer is YES! In this article, we’ll show you the best way to deselect cells in Excel without losing your current selection 😀

Let’s get started!

How to deselect in Excel

The best way to deselect cells in Excel without losing your current selection is using the Deselect Tool. The deselect tool is a new feature in Microsoft Excel that’s present only in Office 2019 or Office 365 subscription.

It’s very easy to use 👍

Let’s say you selected cells and realized you don’t need some of them.

You don’t need to select them again. You just need to know how to deselect the cells you don’t need. This is where the Deselect Tool comes in. You just need to press the Control Key (Ctrl) on your keyboard.

First, open an Excel file and select cells in your worksheet. You can do this by the common click-and-drag method.

select cells to get a selected range

You can also select multiple cells by holding down the Control key and dragging the mouse over a range of cells.

Now, to deselect cells, hold down the Control key (Ctrl) on your keyboard while you click on certain cells you don’t need.

You can deselect contiguous cells (cells that are next to each other vertically or horizontally) or non-contiguous cells (separate cells) or both in your worksheet 👇

Deselecting cells using deselect feature

To deselect contiguous cells, hold down the Ctrl key and drag the mouse.

To deselect non-contiguous cells, hold down the Ctrl key then click on each selected cell.

It’s easy, right? 😀

The same works if you selected columns or rows.

If you need to deselect columns, hold down “Ctrl” and click on the specific column headers (or drag the mouse if they’re contiguous).

deselect all the cells in the column

If you need to deselect rows, hold down “Ctrl” and click on the specific row headers (or drag the mouse if they’re contiguous).

deselect feature on rows

See? You can deselect cells in Excel without having to lose your current selection 😊

The Control key is the key 🔑

That’s it – Now what?

Wasn’t that very easy? With the deselect tool in Microsoft Excel, there’s no need for you to cancel your selection if you included the wrong cells.

Since the Control key is the key, make sure you know when to let go and not let go of your control key when deselecting. This will make you NOT lose your current selection and waste time to have a do-over 😀

New to Microsoft Excel and not sure where to start? Join our free Excel Beginner Training to get started in Excel the right way 📧

Other resources

If you enjoyed learning about deselecting cells, we bet you’d love to know more.

There are so many things you can do to cells in Excel. Whether you want to select multiple cells, merge cells, or even insert pictures into cells in Excel. No problem! We got it all for you! Just click on the links to learn more 😊