Excel won’t scroll down or otherwise? Try this

Last Updated on June 4, 2023 by Dave Farquhar

I regularly work with Excel spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows, correlated. Or hundreds of thousands of rows of raw data. Working with gigabytes of data taught me a lot. Including things it wasn’t supposed to, like what to do when Excel won’t scroll down or otherwise with the keyboard, or Excel mouse scroll isn’t working.

Large, complex Excel sheets are pretty fragile. Among other things, the largest of the sheets will stop scrolling. The scrollbar on the right scrolls, but the display doesn’t move. The mouse wheel scrolls, but again, the screen doesn’t move. And the arrow keys don’t work either. I can’t scroll down, I can’t scroll right, or do anything useful with the data because I can’t see the whole worksheet. In this blog post, I cover two ways to solve the problem when Excel won’t scroll.

Table of contents

1. Freeze Panes can make Excel not scroll
2. The obscure scroll lock key
3. Using the Windows on screen keyboard when you can’t find scroll lock
4. Final thoughts

When Excel won’t scroll, it’s probably Freeze Panes

I regularly freeze the top row on an Excel spreadsheet, so I know what I’m looking at. But this problem sometimes happens even when I don’t have the top row frozen. For some reason, Excel randomly freezes the panes on these worksheets from time to time. And if I do have the top row frozen, Excel may decide to freeze more than just that top row. And that interferes with scrolling down or vertically.

So, when I click on a tab and Excel won’t scroll when I press my arrow keys or use the scrollbar or scroll wheel on my mouse, the solution is to click on View, select Freeze Panes, and select Unfreeze Panes. Now you’ll be able to scroll in Excel again, like magic.

Then, if I want the top row frozen, I scroll to the top, click on the top row, click Freeze Panes again, and select Freeze Top Row.

For the record, I don’t think avoiding use of frozen panes really prevents this problem. It’s a useful feature; it’s just that sometimes it gets enabled with goofy settings that cause a problem. This is especially common on very large worksheets. Once you know the workaround, it’s still annoying but not a terribly big deal. If you have the same problem, hopefully this solves it for you. This solution has been working for me about a decade.

Back to the table of contents

Check your scroll lock key if Excel won’t scroll down or vertically

When it’s not frozen panes, it’s usually the obscure Scroll Lock or SCRLK key. Sometimes it’s even just marked Scroll. Microsoft Excel may be the only commonly used program that still has any use at all for the scroll lock keypress. When SCRLK is enabled, there’s usually an indicator on the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Press your scroll lock key to toggle the scroll lock feature and that will usually fix it. Sometimes you can press that key, or an equivalent to it, and not realize you did, and then break Excel’s ability to scroll. And yes, if Excel mouse scroll isn’t working, this key on the keyboard can still cause it.

This function of the scroll lock key can be a useful feature if you’re aware of it, but I honestly don’t know how many people are aware of it. Speaking only for myself, I am aware of it, having used Excel since the early 1990s, and I sometimes forget about it.

If you have a laptop computer with a smaller keyboard that doesn’t have a scroll lock or scrlk button, it’s usually the FN-K key combination on Lenovo laptops, FN-S on Dell laptops, or FN-C on HP laptops. Who needs standards? But you can easily hit FN-S or FN-C when you mean to hit CTRL-S or CTRL-C, so accidentally enabling scroll lock on a laptop is a very honest mistake.

Here’s some advice on finding scroll lock on various laptop keyboards. MacOS users with a Mac extended keyboard can hold the shift key and hit F14. If that doesn’t work, try Command-F14.

Back to the table of contents

Using the Windows on screen keyboard when you can’t find Scroll Lock

If you have a Windows computer, you can also use the Windows on screen keyboard. Press your Windows key on your keyboard, then type in on-screen keyboard and hit enter. That should launch the on-screen keyboard applet. Click on the scroll lock key to toggle off that option, then close the on screen keyboard app to go back to Excel.

Back to the table of contents

Final thoughts

It’s frustrating when Excel won’t scroll with the keyboard or the mouse. Especially because it’s easy to enable the feature accidentally. And it’s kind of annoying that this freeze panes bug still persists even after all these years. I noticed the problem in 2012 or 2013, but I think it’s existed since Excel 2007, when Excel gained the ability to handle 1.048 million rows of data rather than a mere 65,535 rows like so many other spreadsheets.

But at least you can fix it reliably. I’ve been having this problem with Excel not scrolling for a decade, because analyzing data in Excel is a big, big part of my day job, and one of these two things always fixes it.

If this tip helped you, I have a collection of a few dozen more Office tips and fixes I’ve collected over the years here.

Back to the table of contents