[Martian]

I was having random “keyboard freezes” with Excel 2004. For no apparent reason, suddenly input from the keyboard and mouse buttons would be ignored until I would mouse over and click anywhere outside of an Excel window. Then I could click back into the spreadsheet and continue until another freeze.
The fix (so far, so good — I have my fingers crossed) was to uncheck the Excel Edit Preference item “Cut, copy, and sort objects with cells”.
I hope this helps someone else.
Can anyone explain this?

[Martian]

I jumped the gun on the last post.
This maddeningly erratic problem is eliminated by turning off “Edit directly in cell”.
The most aggravating consequence of this problem would be when keying in a whole column of figures while reading from the source document. I would then look up at the screen and see that entry had stopped and I was banging away on the keypad for nothing.

[Hurley42]

I am glad you mentioned your problem and solution. I have been having this problem all week, for the first time ever. It is a spreadsheet created by someone else, so I had assumed they put some weird macro in the sheet that was causing the problem. I'll know for sure if turning off the feature works later today.

[emmakate]

Thank you for your post!

Your fix stopped the very frustrating problem