impeus.com

Selection highlight missing in Excel. No Active cell highlight in Excel.

Normally, whenever you select a cell in Microsoft Excel (whether by clicking on it, or navigating to it with arrow keys, or by some other means) you can easily tell which cell is selected / active due to the box around it. Shown here, around cell C5:

For some reason, I’ve recently been having a recurring problem whereby the visible cue to show the selected/active cell is just missing. Even if you drag to select a range of cells – you just can’t tell by looking where the selection starts and ends.

I found a few similar issues reported in the Microsoft Answers forum, but I can only assume the respondents hadn’t quite understood the question, since the answer was invariably along the lines of repair or reinstall.

Maybe that would work, maybe it wouldn’t, but it seemed overkill.

I’ve since discovered a way to fix it though. I absolutely don’t understand WHY it happens in the first place, or WHY this solution fixes it. But it does.

1. Whilst in the offending spreadsheet, press F8.
2. Click on a cell.
3. Click on another cell.
4. Press ESC.

That’s it. Try it. If it doesn’t work, try it again.

Good luck!

My Lent 2013 Steam Game Back Catalogue Challenge managed twelve days out of forty. That is… not cracking really, but the reason I stopped was because suddenly first trimester absolutely shatteredness hit, and I spent all my spare time sleeping instead of playing games. Pregnancy does that to you.

It was good fun though, and I discovered some great games that I’d neglected. Of course, I only finished two (Dear Esther and Botanicula) but I also particularly loved Aquaria and will be going back to The Blackwell Legacy too.

This is day eleven of my Lent 2013 Steam Game Back Catalogue Challenge.

This is clearly becoming a bit of a theme. Sadly I was unable to play Dustforce as it just resulted in error messages. Perhaps I’ll be able to fix them at some point. On that note, I managed to sort out Chantelise, so have managed to write a bit about that instead.

This is day six of my Lent 2013 Steam Game Back Catalogue Challenge.

Botanicula is lovely. It is very recognisably Amanita Design’s handiwork, visually, audibly, and whimsically. It is actually difficult to describe it without simply saying “lovely” over and over again.

I’m fairly certain I played it for more than the allotted hour today, but it’s so utterly pleasant and imaginative and – well, lovely – that it felt beyond relaxing. I spent the majority of the time sat with a wistful smile, occasionally punctuated by a wry grin.

There are plenty of little hidden joys – creatures that you discover through exploration, interactions and charming animations that keep you interested. It’s a simple point-and-click adventure, but it never feels like a chore. Even the bits that you’d normally consider mindless clicking somehow felt more mindful. There were several moments where I honestly thought I was clicking on things just for the joy of clicking them and seeing what happened, then something occurred to help my bunch of tree creatures on their quest. It feels serendipitous rather than convoluted.

I suspect you may get more out of the game if you understand Czech – the creature’s names (Soukac, Brouk, Tykvovec, Hrouda, Zavod and Tocnak amongst many others) sound like they may or may not mean something or allude to something. I don’t really feel like I’m missing out but it would be interesting to know if this adds another layer of whimsy for those in the know.

I could quite happily play this all night, but I’d better not.

This is day five of my Lent 2013 Steam Game Back Catalogue Challenge.

Bob Came In Pieces is the kind of game I love in theory.

You are a little space dude with a little space ship that got battered to hell when you crash landed on a planet that looks suspiciously like the earth, except I don’t know who built these convoluted tunnels. You collect pieces as you go to add to and repair your ship – the pieces that you add (and how you configure them) changes your physical appearance (appendages and so on), power, weight, speed, manoeuvrability, and so on. So it’s basically a little puzzler about how to reconfigure your ship (aka series of interconnected pipes and engines) to solve little environmental puzzles.

However, while it’s nice that awkward manoeuvrability has plot justification (your bits are wrong, of course you handle like a sack of, um, pipes), that awkwardness just bugs me. You know how sometimes when you’re trying to time a jump just right, and you have to have a million goes, and it’s almost frustrating but it’s a good frustrating because argh just one more go I nearly nailed it this time aaagh! No I’ve nearly got it, another go? This wasn’t one of those times. Not for me. It was just irritating.

I would like to have another go, perhaps on a day when I’m marginally less irritable, to see if actually I’m being unfair on poor Bob. After all, it’s not his fault he resembles a badly assembled spider – it was after all me that built him that way. And I want to build him better, I do. I just need to be better at moving him around because most of the time I just want to smash him up again.

Sorry Bob.