Is your Ctrl+Space keystroke is gettin' jacked to Chinese?

Greg Truby

MrExcel MVP
Joined
Jun 19, 2002
Messages
10,025
"Huh?! Chinese?! I don't even speak Chinese!!! Well, we'll just pop into the old regional settings and get this taken care of!" And thus began a rather frustrating quick and dirty scouring of the internet.

I had just bought a new notebook and was running Vista. I'd hopped into Excel for the first time and hit Ctrl+Space to select the column and some goofball Chinese language doohickey popped open. I turn on the the Spanish keyboard and language dictionaries for every computer I use. So me and the regional settings are old friends. So I figured it was just a case of popping in and turning off some hot-key definition and I'd be done.

Not so. I did that and it didn't work. I poked around several spots and nothing worked. So "heellllloooo Google!". I don't recall exactly how deep in I went to the search results, maybe forty or fifty results in and it's all bad news... [I searched here and found no threads mentioning the problem, which I thought curious.]

One of the top results was a blog that described EXACTLY what was going on with me. There were several posts from readers and these were programmers who were getting irked because Ctrl+Space is also what fires off Intellisense. And none of these chaps had found a cure - only some work-arounds that didn't seem to work 100% of the time. That blog and other websites recounted all sorts of failed attempts at high-end, very sophisticated solutions. I am grateful that those folks did what they did and posted their results because that's what caused me to try "dumb dumb school" stuff instead. I ended up going back into the Regional Language section and pretended to add a keyboard. I then expanded every Chinese option on the menu and expanding every "Keyboard" and every "other". In a couple of instances the "Drawing pad [32-bit only]" option was checked (even though I'm running Vista 64-bit). I unchecked the drawing pad boxes wherever I found them to be checked, clicked OK and so far, so good.

If you have this problem and try this solution, please post and let me know if this fixes your problem. [Colin is already on record as saying this worked for him.]
 
Last edited:

Excel Facts

Did you know Excel offers Filter by Selection?
Add the AutoFilter icon to the Quick Access Toolbar. Select a cell containing Apple, click AutoFilter, and you will get all rows with Apple
Thank you so much for this post - I must have accidentally hit ctrl+spacebar this morning, and if it wasn't for your message I probably would have lost an entire day of work trying to figure out the solution!! Simply hitting ctrl+space again turned it off... seems ridiculous that there is no mention of that key combination anywhere in the excel help menu, google, etc!
 
Upvote 0

Forum statistics

Threads
1,214,921
Messages
6,122,280
Members
449,075
Latest member
staticfluids

We've detected that you are using an adblocker.

We have a great community of people providing Excel help here, but the hosting costs are enormous. You can help keep this site running by allowing ads on MrExcel.com.
Allow Ads at MrExcel

Which adblocker are you using?

Disable AdBlock

Follow these easy steps to disable AdBlock

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the "Pause on this site" option.
Go back

Disable AdBlock Plus

Follow these easy steps to disable AdBlock Plus

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the toggle to disable it for "mrexcel.com".
Go back

Disable uBlock Origin

Follow these easy steps to disable uBlock Origin

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the "Power" button.
3)Click on the "Refresh" button.
Go back

Disable uBlock

Follow these easy steps to disable uBlock

1)Click on the icon in the browser’s toolbar.
2)Click on the "Power" button.
3)Click on the "Refresh" button.
Go back
Back
Top