How to quickly deselect cells from selected ranges in Excel?

Supposing you need to deselect some cells or ranges from current selections, you have to unselect the whole selection, and reselect again, because Excel does not offer a way to deselect cells once they have been selected. And this article will list some tricky guidance to deselect part of cells or ranges from the current selection.

Deselect part of cells or ranges from selection with VBA code

Deselect part of cells or ranges from selection with Kutools for Excel

For example, you have selected lots of cells, but now you find there are some cells that you don’t want. So you need to deselect them, and leave other selected cells, see following screenshots:

Deselect part of cells or ranges from selection with VBA code

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VBA is a fantastic way to deal with some operations in Excel that is not easy with Excel's commands. So does deselecting cells or ranges.

Step 1: Select the range that you will work with;

Step 2: Click a cell in the selection that you want to deselect with holding down the Ctrl key.

Step 3: Hold down the Alt + F11 keys in Excel, and it opens the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window.

Step 4: Click Insert > Module, and paste the following macro in the Module Window.

VBA for deselecting active cell from selection

Sub UnSelectCell()
'Updateby20140314
Dim rng As Range
Dim InputRng As Range
Dim DeleteRng As Range
Dim OutRng As Range
xTitleId = "KutoolsforExcel"
Set InputRng = Application.Selection
Set InputRng = Application.InputBox("Range :", xTitleId, InputRng.Address, Type:=8)
Set DeleteRng = Application.InputBox("Delete Range", xTitleId, Type:=8)
For Each rng In InputRng
    If Application.Intersect(rng, DeleteRng) Is Nothing Then
        If OutRng Is Nothing Then
            Set OutRng = rng
        Else
            Set OutRng = Application.Union(OutRng, rng)
        End If
    End If
Next
OutRng.Select
End Sub

Step 5: Press the F5 key to run this macro. Then a dialog pops up for you to select a worked range. See screenshots:

Step 6: Then click OK, another dialog pops up for you to deselect cells in the range. And if you want to deselect more than one cell in the range, you can hold Ctrl button to select them one by one. See screenshot:

Step 7: Click OK, and you can see the result:

Deselect part of cells or ranges from selection with Kutools for Excel

If you need to deselect many cells or ranges from selection, the VBA above is not a good way. So we introduce the following trick, the Select Range Helper tools of Kutools for Excel. It can help you deselect any cell or range from selection easily and quickly.

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Step 1: Click Kutools > Select Tool >> Select Range Helper….

Step 2: In Select Range Helper dialog box, check the Deselect Cells option, and then click or drag mouse to deselect cells or ranges from the selection. See screenshot:

Step 3: And the cells you unwanted have been deselected from the selection. At the end, close the Select Range Helper dialog box.

For more detailed information about Select Range Helper, please visit Select Range Helper feature description.

Related articles:

• Select non-adjacent cells or ranges
• Reverse selections of selected ranges
• Select all cells with data in selections

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