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Can’t Scroll in Excel? Here Are Reasons and Easy Fixes!

You cannot scroll any longer in your Excel worksheet? Mainly scrolling up- and down, but also sideward does not work? There are actually a number of possible reasons for that. Let’s explore them below and make you scroll again!

Reason 1: Frozen panes might prevent you to scroll

Frozen panes and zoomed in might be the reason that you can’t scroll in Excel.

Are there frozen panes? E.g. the first row or column? If yes, try to unfreeze them. Therefore, go to View and click on Freeze Panes and then on Unfreeze Panes (if the button says “Freeze Panes” like in the screenshot above it means that this is not the reason and you should proceed to potential reason number 2 below). Can you scroll now?


The reason: Maybe the frozen section is larger than the screen. Please refer to this article for more information about freezing panes.

Reason 2: A dialogue box / window is open

Are there any (hidden) other windows or dialogue boxes open? For example a sort window, but shown somewhere else (e.g. on another screen)? In such case, the scrolling might be disabled as well.

If a dialogue box is open, you can’t scroll in Excel.

Solution: Close the other window.

Reason 3: Holding down the Shift key disables scrolling

Are you pressing the Shift key? Maybe something is pressing down on the key and you haven’t noticed it? In such case, scrolling might not work. So, the solution here would be to just release the Shift key on the keyboard.


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Reason 4: Zooming instead of scrolling

If your workbook zooms in or out, you are probably pressing the Ctrl key at the same time. So, just release the Ctrl key and you should be able to scroll again.

Reason 5: Your scroll wheel on the mouse is broken…

Just kidding – hopefully you have solved it with reasons 1 to 4 above!

Reason 6 (new): AutoFit Row Height might help

Thanks to Ulli for the comment below this article! It seems to have helped many visitors to this page. Because I couldn’t validate it myself (have never had this problem before and could not recreate it), I just copy his/her comment from below.

Hi,
I had the issue with one tab not scrolling vertically in a workbook. The solution was to go Control A to mark all cells on the sheet and format ‘AutoFit row height’.
It was driving me nuts. And glad to share this so others are saved 

Anything else?

What was the reason for you? On of the things above? Or anything else? Please leave a note – if there is another reason that I might have missed I will add it here. Thanks!

Image by Here and now, unfortunately, ends my journey on Pixabay from Pixabay

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