Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Prevent Excel from pasting a cell across an entire row

Excel has a behavior that I guess has been purposefully designed but which has made me lose quite a lot of time over the years. This behavior happens after the following steps:



  • Copy a finite range of cells (Ctrl + C)

  • Select a line or a column (Shift + Space or Control + Space)

  • Insert new (Ctrl + "+")


I do this a lot, always involuntarily, when trying to insert a new row or a new cell before pasting my cell or range or cell.


When this happens, the cell or range is inserted not once but across the entire line or column, e.g. if I have selected a 2x2 range and insert in on one row, it will be repeated until the end of the row.


If I copy then insert this range:
enter image description here


It then repeats it across an entire row (until column XFD!):
enter image description here


This is very annoying because it sometimes take quite a bit of processing power to process the entire row(s) of pasted stuff, especially when it contains formulas; and it takes even more time to Ctrl + Z for some reason (cancelling the insertion of an entire row of pasted formulas often makes the computer freeze for a few seconds, and has even, on some occasions, caused Excel to crash altogether). There have been literally zero occasion of which I have triggered this behavior purposefully.


Of course, one solution would be to never insert something that you don't want to insert (duh) but that is actually not that easy and I know some of my colleagues sometimes make the mistake as well.


Is there a way to disable this behavior?

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