I am Attempting to copy one cell to another cell. But when I press the control-v to do the copy, it responds that I can't do that on multiple cells. I don't know why it says that I am selecting multiple cells.
I start over. I select the cell again. This time it copies okay.
Is there any way I can disable this annoying feature of Excel thinking I want to select nonadjacent cells at the same time?
I believe FlexYourData is on to the right idea here.
First, you must mean that the error message comes when you press Ctrl-C to do the copy, not when you press "Ctrl-V to do the copy." If instead you meant to say "Ctrl-V to do the paste" then what comes after here does not answer your question.
The thing FlexYourData brings up DOES happen, but will not lead to the error message if the cells are in the same row, or are in the same column. So you could have it happening often, and yet sometimes not happening due to the latter (sometimes) involving cells in the same row or cells in the same column.
(That is NOT meant, by the way, to address how you have it happen, then try again and it works fine. That's explained by a different thing I'll mention in a moment.)
So, you have some cell selected, likely somewhere far enough away from the one you will copy that having both selected (highlighted) does not get noticed (so off-screen, or may on different edges, something like that). For simplicity though, let's say you had B3 as the active cell and wish to copy A1 to the clipboard and paste it in cell D2.
If you roll the mouse to A1, press Ctrl with B3 still highlighted, then click on A1, and finally press C to copy it, this exact error message will pop up.
The solution is to click A1, then, and only then, to press Ctrl-C. All will work fine then. So the click to select, THEN and only then, any pressing of the Ctrl key.
In that, you can see how it (presumably "usually") DOES work just fine the second time you do it. After clearing the error message from the screen, you mention that you select the cell again. The way it happens that I described above feels like the action of someone trying to optimize his actions, speed things up, not waste time. But at this moment, you choose to definitively select A1 again ("I select the cell again." in the question). That makes A1 the ONLY selected cell this time so Excel has no concerns and does the copy.
Back to the exception I mentioned for a last point. If in the same row or column, Excel is fine with having two (or more) random cells selected, then copied. Why that but not what I described using A1 and B3?
Well, Excel knows pasting (even if only formats or what-have-you) somewhere is almost certainly coming. After all it's called "copy and paste" as if it's a single thing, not two utterly separate actions. So it will have to figure out just how to do the pasting.
It's approach is to take the copied cells as a one dimensional construct and to ignore the fact that because they were selected separately rather than as a block (or now that we can selectively deselect some, that the bl
