Selecting and deselecting in Excel is the most common thing you often do. You may need to select cells, rows, columns, or even entire spreadsheets. It often happens that you have to deselect some cells that are selected by mistake.

Do you know how to deselect Excel? Without losing all the selection you can deselect Excel easily. And this is what you are going to learn in this post.

So far, Excel does not have any specific option to deselect the cells from the selected cell range. That’s why it isn’t possible to perform the function directly; however, we have some solutions to it.

How to Deselect Excel – Easy Approach

Here in this example, suppose you need to select month columns only. Let’s see how you will do it:

Press and hold the CTRL key and select the cell ranges with the help of the mouse. It lets you select only desired cells while ignoring others. Somehow, you may accidentally select other cells or extra rows. So, how would you deselect them? Let’s see:

• Hold the CTRL key.
• Click on the cell you need to deselect. If you need to deselect the cell range, click on it and drag it to cover the complete range.

• When you are done with deselecting cell ranges, try to repeat the same procedure. Hold the CTRL key and select cells. Also, make sure the sheet you are working on is not protected, or else you will not be able to do it.

How to Deselect Excel Entire Columns?

By mistake when you select entire columns or rows you need to follow the below-given steps:

• Press and hold the CTRL key from the keyboard.
• Now, click on the column header and drag down the entire column. It helps in deselecting the column from the current selection.

• Here in this example, you can see by pressing and holding the CTRL key the column header is selected. It helps in dragging the column to D15. That’s it!

How to Deselect Specific Columns in Excel?

Here in this example, you will see how you can deselect particular columns from the sheet. It might be possible that you want to deselect that particular column by selecting the whole sheet. For this, below are steps to follow:

• We will deselect the 5th and 9th columns only.
• Click on the triangle given at the upper left side of the sheet to select the entire sheet. Or else you can press CTRL + A to select the complete sheet.

• Press and hold the CTRL key.
• Select the columns you need to remove from the selection.

All done!

That’s it! What Comes Next?

So now you are well aware of how to deselect Excel cells with the help of multiple features. Isn’t that easy?

You are no longer required to cancel the entire selection when your selection includes some wrong cells. With the CTRL key from the keyboard, you can easily deselect whatever cell range you need from the selection. It simply will not undo the complete selection and saves you time.