Friday 21 June 2013

How To Remove A Text Box or any unselectable object from Excel 2003/2007

We need to activate Design Mode where all objects are selectable:

Tools > Customize > Toolbars : Tick "Exit Design Mode"

(Although Excel 2003 calls the button "Exit Design Mode" it is in fact a toggle switch for Design Mode. I suggest attaching the new small (only one icon!) toolbar to the Excel menus.)


You can now toggle between design mode on and off by clicking the Design Mode icon.

With Design Mode on, select the object you wish to delete (in this case the text box) and delete it...
 

Switch off Design Mode again.  Optionally remove "Exit Design Mode" toolbar from Excel.

40 comments:

  1. you are freaking brilliant! thanks

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  2. In Excel 2010: "Design Mode" is found in the "Developer" Tab.

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    1. THANK YOU - I found several mentions of how to fix this issue but everyone says Design Mode, but the new versions of Excel do not have this. Thank you sincerely for supplying the missing piece to their explanations.

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  3. How to delete after the design mode is on?

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    1. "With Design Mode on, select the object you wish to delete (in this case the text box) and delete it..."

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  4. In 2010 go to "Page Layout" and click on "Selection Pane" - choosing "Hide All" should get rid of the box.

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    1. Thank you soooooooooooooooooo much!! After a month of trying the box i hated has been removed!!

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    2. You are the best!!! Finally figured out how to get rid of that awful box so I can work in my sheet again. :)

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    3. YES!! thank you! I have suffered with this box for months and this worked!

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  5. That was really fantastic buddy. Don't know why these MS guys keep changing UI with every version.

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  6. So good... didn't know this tab existed. Thanks.

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  7. Brilliant, that solved a weird mysterious text box that wouldn't go away after we imported some HTML into an Excel spreadsheet. Thank you!!

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  8. Another cause/solution to this problem is for shared workbooks you must first unshared before you can select and modify a text box, etc.

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  9. You saved my life - thanks!!

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  10. I have removed almost all of the text boxes that are still on my Excel 2007 work sheet. But the original one is still there and I cannot get back to entering figures on the worksheet without a text box around it. I cannot turn off the text box icon, but have the bold t that keeps appearing whenever I start to type in figures.

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  11. Most helpful tip, thanks for saving my sanity----thank you!!!

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  12. Thank you! It appeared to me that I wasn't deleting it when I selected and pressed delete. I decided to move it and noticed I had more and that I had deleted it. I kept deleting until they all went away. :) woot.

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  13. I am trying to paste HTML data from website into Excel and then read the data via a macro.
    However, I cannot read data in text boxes, i.e., text box contains name 'John' how do I get the name from the text box.

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  14. Anonymous 22nd December. Thank you it worked a treat.

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  15. This helped a lot. Thank you very much!
    greetings from Germany

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  16. THANK YOU THANK YOU I thought I would lose my mind with those damn boxes!

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  17. I was going to go crazy if I saw another Google search result about making sure the pointer was on the edge of the text box. That didn't work. Your solution did! And so I have my sanity back. Forever grateful to you!

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  18. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  19. Amazing, thank you! This took 4 seconds to fix, but has been driving me nuts! Such a simple solution.

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  20. Mr Zzoom note to self:

    Removed anonymous "best solution" message with clickbait link.

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  21. I was going to throw my work laptop through the wall and beat the crap out on my coworker, but your help saved me, thank you.

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  22. Didn't work for me. On or off I could not delete the drop down menu box.

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  23. Thank you so much !

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  24. Really appreciate your help, thank you so much

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  25. I have Excel 2016 with the same issue and tried most of the suggestions...nothing worked...until I found someone's comment that said to press "F5" when you are in your document and sure enough it changed those un editable boxes into image boxes and then just press delete...

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    1. In Excel 365: Press F5 from anywhere in the sheet BUT from the evil text box you want to delete. It pops the "Reach" window. Click "Cells..." on the lower right corner of the window, then select "Objects"; then click "OK", then press the Delete key and your evil text box should be gone like mine.

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  26. Thank you so much, it worked! The "box" was driving me crazy for a long time lol

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  27. It is now 12-14-23 and this advice is still works well. You are awesome.

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