How to unselect Excel Cell using Keyboard Shortcut?

One can select multiple Excel cells (either contiguously or not) using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Click.

How do you deselect one or more of these previously-selected cells?

3 Answers

By using the SHIFT and/or the CTRL keys you can select non-contiguous ranges. However, if you select a cell or area by mistake, there is no built in way to remove that from the selection without losing the entire selection and having to start over. This page describes to VBA procedures, UnSelectActiveCell and UnSelectCurrentArea that will remove the Active Cell or the Area containing the Active Cell from the current selection. All other cells in the Selection will remain selected.

Your best bet would be to add these to your Personal Macro workbook so that they are available to all open workbooks in Excel.

This procedure will remove the Active Cell from the Selection.

Sub UnSelectActiveCell() Dim R As Range Dim RR As Range For Each R In Selection.Cells If StrComp(R.Address, ActiveCell.Address, vbBinaryCompare) <> 0 Then If RR Is Nothing Then Set RR = R Else Set RR = Application.Union(RR, R) End If End If Next R If Not RR Is Nothing Then RR.Select End If
End Sub

This procedure will remove the Area containing the Active Cell from the Selection.

Sub UnSelectCurrentArea() Dim Area As Range Dim RR As Range For Each Area In Selection.Areas If Application.Intersect(Area, ActiveCell) Is Nothing Then If RR Is Nothing Then Set RR = Area Else Set RR = Application.Union(RR, Area) End If End If Next Area If Not RR Is Nothing Then RR.Select End If
End Sub

A more robust way for deselecting multiple cells is described in this ExtendOffice article. It does include an extra prompt, but you can deselect an arbitrary number of cells/selections at once (instead of deselecting only the active cell or area)

I'm posting the script here, with a small usability improvement (conditionally removed the redundant first prompt from the original post):

Sub DeselectCells() Dim rng As Range Dim InputRng As Range Dim DeleteRng As Range Dim result As Range xTitleId = "Deselect Cells" Set InputRng = Application.Selection If InputRng.Count <= 1 Then Set InputRng = Application.InputBox("Range :", xTitleId, InputRng.Address, Type:=8) End If Set DeleteRng = Application.InputBox("Delete Range", xTitleId, Type:=8) For Each rng In InputRng If Application.Intersect(rng, DeleteRng) Is Nothing Then If result Is Nothing Then Set result = rng Else Set result = Application.Union(result, rng) End If End If Next result.Select
End Sub

To use it, you make a selection, invoke the DeselectCells macro (which is best to be saved in your Personal macro book and assigned to a shortcut) and select the cells to be deselected in the popup that appears:

It is now possible to unselect with CTRL a cell selected by mistake. It's a new built in function in Office 365 or recent versions. Finally!