How to Enable and Disable Scroll Lock in Excel?

A scroll lock is a function that determines the action of arrow keys present on your keyboard when you are working in Excel. You might have experienced that sometimes pressing the arrow keys moves the entire excel sheet instead of moving the cursor to the next cell.

You can easily enable and disable the scroll lock feature. But before moving to the steps let us first know more about the scroll lock feature in the spreadsheet.

What is Scroll Lock in Excel?

Scroll lock is a feature that decides the function of the arrow key in excel. You can easily enable and disable this feature as per your convenience. By default, the scroll lock feature is disabled.

1. In the disabled state, if you press the arrow keys of your keyboard, it will allow you to navigate the cells of your excel worksheet.
2. In the enabled state, the arrow keys act differently and it doesn’t allow you to navigate to different cells of your worksheet instead it scrolls the entire worksheet.

The excel users like to work with scroll lock disabled. In some cases, the user accidentally enables this feature. Knowing the scroll lock feature let us now discuss the steps to enable and disable it.

Steps to Enable and Disable Scroll Lock in Excel:

Enable Scroll Lock

Step 1: To enable the scroll lock you just have to press the “Scroll Lock” button present on your keyword.

Or

Step 1: In case your keyboard doesn’t have a scroll lock button then you can enable the “On-Screen Keyboard”. To enable the on-screen keyboard, click:

Start>Settings>Ease of Access> Keyboard

Step 2: Here you have to switch on the “Use the On-Screen Keyboard” toggle button.

Step 3: When your On-Screen keyboard appears just click on the “ScrLK” button.

Disable Scroll Lock

Step 1: To disable the scroll lock, we just have to press the “Scroll Lock” button again on the keyboard.

Scroll Lock on Status Bar

Well, the spreadsheet does not exclusively show whether the scroll lock is on or off.

To show the status of scroll lock on the sheet ‘right click’ on the status bar of the spreadsheet. From the displayed menu click on the ‘Scroll Lock‘.

This will let the scroll lock appear on the excel sheet’s status bar. So when the scroll lock is enabled it will appear on the status bar and when it is disabled it doesn’t appear on the status bar.

So, this is how you can enable and disable scroll lock in Excel.