Pink border around cell or cells restricts arrow key movement

acap · September 20, 2025, 4:00am

Sometimes, without expecting it, a pink border appears around a cell or several cells in Calc and causes the arrow keys to always jump the cell selection back to that area no matter where I click with the mouse. It seems to grow arbitrarily unless I quit and reopen. Track changes is not on and there’s no conditional formatting. Please see this video to observe the behavior.

Edit: it seems to grow when I tab ⇥ or return to finish editing any non pinkified cell. Editing the pink region cells doesn’t cause it to grow. It seems to shrink when I ⌘⇥ to switch applications and back. Or at least, it will adjust its size based on the current cell selection. It also adjusts the size of the bordered range whenever I scroll.

Version: 25.8.0.4 (AARCH64)
Build ID: 48f00303701489684e67c38c28aff00cd5929e67
CPU threads: 24; OS: macOS 13.7.5; UI render: Skia/Metal; VCL: osx
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

LeroyG · September 21, 2025, 6:04pm

I see no clue in the video, except that it is a .xlsx document. Do you created it with Calc?
Take a look at the Application Colors (menu Tools - Options - LibreOffice) if do you see the same pink color for some element of spreadsheets.

acap · September 22, 2025, 3:26pm

It was made in Excel, and then I downloaded it and edited it in Calc.

The closest matches I could find to the color in Options > LibreOffice > Appearance > Customizations were:

Smart tags
References

LeroyG · September 22, 2025, 6:21pm

So, if this doesn’t happen in new documents (created with Calc), if I were you, I would try to recreate the spreadsheet.

fpy · September 20, 2025, 5:42am

see Cell Edit Mode

acap · September 20, 2025, 9:17pm

Did you read my initial post or watch the video I linked? I am not having issues editing cells. I am having issues moving the cell selection with the arrow keys on the keyboard. The cell selection movement in the video seems to be restricted around the area that gained the pink outline (which I did not add in post – it looks like that in Calc). Do you have an idea of what might cause this behavior?