Doing a Line Dance

May 8, 2015 9:41 AM

There are these selectable objects/lines all over my Excel spreadsheet. Instead of selecting a cell, I'll often accidentally click one of these instead, and it is very annoying. Please help.

As seen here.

They are literally all over. Instead of the little white cross that comes with selecting a cell, I'll get the regular black cross with arrows that comes from selecting any object in Office. If I click in the same place and delete enough of them I can select the cell beneath. Also if I just dodge them and find a little place where the cursor turns into the cell selector.

How can I delete all of these lines easily?

If it matters, this is Office 2011 on a Mac.

posted by papayaninja to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Did you copy and paste that data from somewhere else, maybe a Word document or a web page? Those lines are images from the source. I'd highlight the cells that contain your data, copy them, and paste as plain text in another sheet.
posted by desjardins at 9:50 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I don't know if it's the same in the Mac version, but in the Windows version, to delete all the embedded objects in a sheet, you would use the command Home > Find and Select > Go To Special... > Objects. This will select all the objects in the current worksheet, so you would then just have to press delete.
posted by zixyer at 10:04 AM on May 8, 2015 [4 favorites]

If you have formulas and other things you want to preserve, rather than copying and pasting you can remove all of the drawing objects as explained here. If you're using a different version of excel, google "excel [your version] remove all objects" to figure out how to do it in your particular version.
posted by sockermom at 10:06 AM on May 8, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks! For Excel 2011 on the Mac, it appears to be Edit > Go To... > Special > Objects. Then delete.

Perfect. Thanks, all.
posted by papayaninja at 10:27 AM on May 8, 2015