How to Change Cursor Color in Excel (2 Quick Methods)

A cursor helps us identify the current active region on a computer screen. But if the cursor color is identical to that of the theme color or the background color, it might be quite hard to separately recognize the cursor. Thus, changing the cursor color becomes obvious by then. In this article, I will show you how can you change the cursor color in Excel with ease.

Table of Contents hide

Download Practice Workbook

What Is a Cursor?

2 Quick Methods to Change Cursor Color in Excel

1. Change Cursor Color of Selected Cells Using VBA

2. Advanced Options to Change Cursor Color of Active/Inactive Cell

Things to Remember

Conclusion

Download Practice Workbook

You can download the Excel file from the following link and practice along with it.

Alter Cursor Color.xlsm

What Is a Cursor?

A cursor is an indicator on a display that helps to recognize the current active region controlled by an input device.

In Excel, you will see two types of cursor mainly. The first one is a mouse cursor. This mouse cursor shows where you are pointing currently using the mouse. The second one is the cell border cursor. This shows which cell or which cell range is currently active.

2 Quick Methods to Change Cursor Color in Excel

I will be using the following Sales Report to show you to change the cursor color in Excel.

1. Change Cursor Color of Selected Cells Using VBA

It’s really frustrating that Excel doesn’t have any built-in feature to change the cursor color of the active cell or the selected cells.

The default cursor color of the active cell border is Green. Sadly there’s no option to change this default active single-cell border color.

However, you can change the cursor color of the selected cell range using a VBA code.

Now I’m going to show you how to change the cursor color of the selected cells in Excel using VBA.

❶ First of all, go to Developer ➤ Visual Basic to open the VBA Editor.

If you don’t have the Developer tab, you can press ALT + F11 to open the VBA Editor.

❷ After that double-click on the Excel sheet name that you want to prompt for the changes of the selected cell cursor color.

❸ After that, select Worksheet from the drop-down menu across the General option.

When you select Worksheet instead of General, the following two lines of code generate instantly.

Private Sub Worksheet_SelectionChange(ByVal mrTarget As Range)

End Sub

❹ Now insert the following two lines in the VBA Editor between the two lines generated automatically.

 Cells.Borders.ColorIndex = xlNone
    Target.Borders.Color = vbRed

In this VBA code, the line “mrTarget.Borders.Color = vbRed” changes the selected cells’ cursor color from black to Red. For your kind information, the default cursor color of the selected cells is Black. But this VBA code changes the cursor color from Black to Red. You can choose other colors as per your choice. You just need to edit the target border color. That’s it.

❺ Anyways, after inserting the code, save it.

Now come back to your Excel sheet. And select a range of cells. You will see that the active cells’ border color has changed from Black to Red.

Here’s I’ve attached a screenshot of my dataset being selected. You can see that the cursor color is red here.

2. Advanced Options to Change Cursor Color of Active/Inactive Cell

This method changes the cursor color of all cell borders. Another way to say that it changes the cell grid colors regardless of the cells being selected or inactive.

❶ At first, you need to go to the File menu.

❷ Then select Options.

The Excel Options dialog box will appear.

❸ Now select Advanced from the left-most column.

❹ After that go to the ‘Display option for this worksheet’ section.

❺ Check ‘Show gridlines’.

❻ Then select a gridline color beside the ‘Gridline Color’ option.

I’m selecting an Orange color here.

❼ After that press the OK button.

Now you will see that the cursor color of the gridlines has changed to orange. The default color of the gridlines is black. But the color is now changed to orange.

Things to Remember

The VBA method changes the cursor color of only the sheet where you’ve embedded the VBA It doesn’t affect the other Excel sheets.
If ALT + F11 doesn’t open the VBA Editor, then try ALT + Fn + F11. I Hope, this might work this time.

Conclusion

To sum up, we have discussed 2 methods to change cursor color in Excel. And don’t hesitate to ask any questions in the comment section below. We will try to respond to all the relevant queries asap. And please visit our website Exceldemy to explore more.