Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Select multiple drawing objects in Excel

This problem was giving me an enormous headache. I had a bunch of images of my results in a spreadsheet next to the quantification of each image. I wanted to reuse all the formulas and layout etc, but remove the images from my old results. I had too many images to happily Shift-Click them. I wanted a single command to select all of them. I knew they were in the drawing layer, but I couldn't get any further. Google gave me nothing. Finally, just fiddling around, I discovered that if you select one of the images, then you can select all of the rest with the Cmd-A shortcut (that's Ctrl-A for those of you on Windows). A caveat: I'm using Excel 2004 for Mac; Leopard on Macbook Pro. There were relatively few pictures that I wanted to keep, so it was easy to use the mouse to de-select those before I deleted the rest. I'm posting this in hopes that it won't take as much time for the next poor sucker who uses some obscure Excel functionality to solve this problem.

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