Copy and Paste in Microsoft Excel

Any time I copy a cell (or a block of cells) in MS Excel, they get surrounded by what MS calls a “moving border”, and some call a “marquee”. It is a dotted or dashed line moving counterclockwise around the cell(s). This continues even after the cell has been pasted elsewhere.

This is very easily stopped by pressing the ESC button, but that has to be done every single time I copy something. I want to prevent this from happening to begin with. I find it very annoying. Surely there is something in the Options to address this, but I haven’t found it. Can anyone help me?

As a side question, I’m curious if anyone else finds this moving border to be useful. Why do I need a reminder about which cells I’ve copied? If I need to know what’s in the Clipboard, I can paste it onto a blank area. But most of my copy&paste is very quick here-to-there, and I don’t want these reminders. And why only in Excel? MS Word doesn’t put any comparable border around any text that I’m copying; what makes Excel special?

(By the way, all the above applies to all versions of Excel that I’ve used, from Excel 97 to Excel 2003, so I don’t mind hearing responses, regardless of which version you are using.)

Excel has two ways to paste a copied cell

  • Ctrl V (Edit/Paste) leaves the selection active and allows the cell to be copied to multiple destinations.
  • Just hitting Enter in the destination cell copies the cell once and clears the moving border

Thanks! I just tried it. Wow, that is easy.

But it is not standard. Ctrl-V and Shift-Insert and the Edit Menu are standard throughout MS Office (and other programs). So if anyone can turn the border off entirely, I’d still like to hear it.

Yes, in the graphics editing world, it’s also called the “marching ants”.

Excel is different from Word because spreadsheet cells have extra semantic meaning that’s not easily seen by surface level text that is displayed on the screen.

For example, suppose you have some dollar amounts in cells A1, A2, A3. In A5, you have a formula =SUM(A1:A3).

A1 =$1.00
A2 =$2.00
A3 =$3.00

A5 =SUM(A1:A3)

The key is that A5 will visually show $6.00 and not =SUM(A1:A3).

Now you want to copy that summation to cell B5.

If you Ctrl+C (copy) the A5 cell to B5, you’ll get the marching ants surrounding A5… you then Ctrl+V (paste) the formula to B5. You’ll see that B5 shows $0.00 because Excel (trying to predict what you’re wanting to do) will rewrite the formula as =SUM(B1:B3). The marching ants keeps you aware of where the cell contents have been copied from even though the actual numerical display at that moment do not match. Since $6.00 doesn’t look like $0.00, the marching ants is the visual cue that helps you know where the $0.00 was copied from. MS Word doesn’t have this extra semantic layer of meaning (unless one uses macro “fields” which is a different conversation.) In MS Word, if you copy&paste the phrase “United States” to another part of the document, it’s going to say “United States” … very straightforward and no marching ants are needed.

Now, if you use MS Excel as mostly a grid for plain text and no formulas, then yes, the marching ants indicator is redundant.

  • I find it very useful for those times when I’ve copied one row/column more or less than I intended.

  • Power-users (folks who do not use the mouse in excel) copy and paste very quickly and the marching ants makes it easy to keep track of what’s moving where.

-I imagine it’s also useful for non-power-users for the exact same reason.

It may not be a useful feature for you, but for the majority of folks it is, because as **Ruminator **notes, you’re not just copying text, but actually changing the underlying formulas and cell references, so it is fundamentally different from Word’s copy/paste.

Thanks to both of you. That does make sense.

Power-users don’t use the mouse in Excel? That’s crazy talk! :stuck_out_tongue:

For some, this visual cue can definitely be the #1 reason. It’s the idea that the brain is comprehending a particular group of cells as an enclosed rectangular shape. It’s often easier to build out spreadsheets by copying rectangles of cells from one place to another without overthinking what the underlying formulas are. With MS Word, we don’t think of text phrases as rectangles – it’s just a sequence of characters. Because of wordwrap and right-margin justification, the target paste of text is not going to look like the source (shape wise.) In Excel, we use rectangular marquees as a mental crutch.

Indeed, in my office, one of most common grunt-work tasks to give new college grads is a spreadsheet with a few rows and columns filled in. Their job is to copy out the rest of the spreadsheet. The college grad may have no understanding whatsoever of the financial formulas in the spreadsheet cells but he can immediately comprehend instructions of copying this column about N rows big to multiple spots on the spreadsheet. Explaining the underlying formulas would take weeks. Just showing the size of “shapes” to cut&paste and he’s productive within a few minutes. Marching ants – gotta love 'em.