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.
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40 comments:

  1. Unknown10 April 2014 at 23:16

    you are freaking brilliant! thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2 July 2014 at 16:27

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous25 April 2018 at 17:07

      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.

      Delete
  3. Anonymous5 September 2014 at 22:33

    thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous17 November 2014 at 11:29

    worked for me!

    ReplyDelete
  5. |one|y Boy7 December 2014 at 15:31

    How to delete after the design mode is on?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mr.Zzoom6 March 2015 at 10:53

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

      Delete
  6. Anonymous22 December 2014 at 17:21

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous30 September 2015 at 16:23

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

      Delete
    2. Unknown21 October 2015 at 20:07

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

      Delete
    3. Anonymous5 January 2016 at 22:26

      Thank you!

      Delete
    4. Unknown23 September 2016 at 18:51

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

      Delete
  7. Anonymous13 February 2015 at 03:48

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

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous26 February 2015 at 04:17

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

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous3 August 2015 at 16:27

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

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous13 October 2015 at 04:44

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

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous10 February 2016 at 14:18

    You saved my life - thanks!!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous14 March 2016 at 14:55

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous30 March 2016 at 15:39

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

    ReplyDelete
  14. Nikhil Menon5 May 2016 at 09:48

    Genius you!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Unknown9 June 2016 at 22:00

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous16 September 2016 at 01:35

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Unknown8 January 2017 at 21:09

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

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anonymous30 January 2017 at 12:30

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

    ReplyDelete
  19. Unknown8 September 2017 at 03:27

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

    ReplyDelete
  20. Unknown31 October 2017 at 23:41

    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!

    ReplyDelete
  21. Unknown1 February 2018 at 12:11

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Anonymous1 February 2018 at 12:13

    thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Unknown21 February 2018 at 22:30

    thank you

    ReplyDelete
  24. Anonymous3 May 2018 at 18:08

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

    ReplyDelete
  25. Mr.Zzoom14 January 2019 at 10:53

    Mr Zzoom note to self:

    Removed anonymous "best solution" message with clickbait link.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Anonymous1 May 2019 at 16:34

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Anonymous15 May 2019 at 01:33

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

    ReplyDelete
  28. Anonymous12 July 2019 at 05:18

    Thank you so much !

    ReplyDelete
  29. Anonymous20 December 2019 at 05:36

    Really appreciate your help, thank you so much

    ReplyDelete
  30. Anonymous22 December 2019 at 04:19

    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...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unknown10 June 2021 at 22:58

      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.

      Delete
  31. Unknown9 January 2020 at 11:30

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

    ReplyDelete
  32. Unknown21 April 2020 at 16:20

    THANK YOU!!!! Worked well!

    ReplyDelete
  33. Anonymous14 December 2023 at 20:53

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

    ReplyDelete

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