Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 17, 2025)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
When Jose double-clicks on a word in a worksheet, Excel selects the entire word. If the word contains a special character, though, then the selection is truncated by that character. This means that less than a full word is selected. Jose wonders if there is a way to have Excel ignore the special character and select the entire word.
This behavior is consistent with how other Office programs (such as Word) allow you to select by clicking, as well. There is no way to change that behavior; it is hard coded into the program.
The workaround, however, is easy enough to implement. Let's say that you have a special character inside of a word, such as a bullet inside a company name. To select it, just double-click on the portion either before the bullet or after, but don't release the mouse button after the second click. Instead, simply drag the mouse pointer to whichever half of the word you didn't double-click on. Excel (like Word) continues to expand the selection by a word at a time until you release the mouse button. Thus, you would double-click and drag instead of just double-clicking.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (13774) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.
Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!
Entering characters that use diacritical marks is easy as pie in Word and some other programs. Not so in Excel, it takes ...
Discover MoreFew things are as frustrating as trying to delete rows or columns and having Excel tell you that you can't perform the ...
Discover MoreEnter information into a cell, and Excel needs to figure out what type of information it is. Here's how Excel interprets ...
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
2025-07-17 16:11:03
Ronmio
Maybe Microsoft should fix that hard-coding to at least recognize the thousands of HYPHENated words like well-known, fast-paced, easy-to-use, high-quality, state-of-the-art, old-fashioned, first-class, cost-effective, high-tech, long-term, high-risk, brown-eyed, hard-working, and soft-spoken. While they're at it, they could improve their spell checkers to flag/fix compound modifiers (the grammer term) that are too often written without the necessary hyphen. Without hyphenization, the meaning can be dramatically different. Examples:
▪︎ a high-school administrator vs. a high school administrator
▪︎ a story about a man-eating tiger vs. one about a man eating tiger
Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2026 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Comments