What did I do to my Excel page and how do I fix it?
December 9, 2019 11:53 AM   Subscribe

Instead of solid lines around all of the cells, I now have dotted lines and it won't let me cut, paste or move images within cells or from one to another. I already saved and quit and reopened - same issue. No other spreadsheet I tried opening has this problem -- I clearly did something wrong -- but what? Help?!

I'm working on an Excel spreadsheet for a friend, which is something which I've never worked with before. My task is pasting screenshots into one row of cells. I'm on a Mac. So - I go to the file, take a screenshot of the important bit, drag it from Grab into Excel, and move it into the right cell. Or when I'm feeling less lazy, I select the cell and go to Insert Photo -> From File and open the saved screenshot.

I dragged an image from Grab, dragged it into my spreadsheet, the same way I've been doing for the past couple of days (off and on), and suddenly I couldn't move it into place. I was actually able to delete it by hitting "undo", but from that point on, I couldn't shift, paste, or add any more images into the spreadsheet. When I select a cell and go to "Insert Photo" it only gives me the option to select from the browser, not from file -- that option is still there, just unclickable. Because I saved and quit and reopened, Undo is not an option for me. I checked the Cell Borders, and it's still set to solid lines, so I'm pretty sure the dotted lines (which are all blue, like you get when you double-click one cell) have something to do with the problem... but what?
posted by Mchelly to Technology (3 answers total)
 
You could try saving the spreadsheet in various file formats, closing Excel, and opening the saved versions, in the hope that whatever feature or bug that's been turned on and is causing the problem is stripped away. (And if you find a format that works then check to make sure all of the content and formulas or whatever are also still visible and working, then save as the current Excel version again.)
posted by XMLicious at 12:13 PM on December 9, 2019




Not familiar with Excel for Mac but it almost sounds like you've managed to make page breaks around every cell; blue dotted borders are used in page break preview view on Windows, for sure, and having such tiny pages set might explain why it's not letting any image get pasted into the available space.

Try (Windows menu structure, so might need to fish a bit):

Page Layout >>> Breaks >>> Reset All Page Breaks
posted by protorp at 12:39 PM on December 9, 2019


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