Having spent enough of my career building Dashboards for Security Programs in various tooling, Excel continues to be the most common. However as a cell-based platform it is far from ideal when dealing with objects in general. I have however discovered the following tricks.
Select Objects
Sometimes you want to just select all graphs, text boxes etc to set fonts, styles or just move them. Using ctrl + left click or cmd + left click is a PITA if you have more than a few objects. If you try and click and drag (like trying to drag a bounding box around the objects) you end up selecting cells.
Turns out there is a “mode” where you can switch to “Object Selection” rather than “Cell Selection”.
Under the Home ribbon → Find & Select → Select Objects
Stop Objects being affected by Cell Resizing
Another annoying thing about Excel is when you (or your Pivot Tables) adjust Cell size (width or height) your Objects either move, resize or just get messed up.
Use the Shape Options → Properties and make sure “Don’t move or size with cells” is selected.
Now it doesn’t matter what you do with the underlying cells – your objects stay where you put them!
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