Scrolling through an Excel 2010 Worksheet

By Greg Harvey from Excel 2010 For Dummies

You can use the horizontal scroll bar in Excel 2010 to scroll left and right in a worksheet and the vertical scroll bar to scroll up and down. The horizontal scroll bar appears at the bottom of the worksheet area, while the vertical scroll bar appears to the right of the worksheet area.

Here are some scrolling techniques for navigating in an Excel worksheet:

To scroll one column or row at a time in a particular direction, click the appropriate scroll arrow at the ends of the scroll bar. For example, to scroll right one column, click the arrow on the right side of the horizontal scroll bar.
To move up or down an entire screen, click in the area above or below the scroll box in the vertical scroll bar. Click in the area to the left or right of the scroll box in the horizontal scroll bar to move left or right an entire screen.
If your mouse has a wheel, you can use it to scroll directly through the columns and rows of the worksheet without using the horizontal or vertical scroll bars. Simply position the white-cross mouse pointer in the center of the worksheet area and then either hold down the wheel button of the mouse or press it once. When the mouse pointer changes to a four-pointed arrow, drag the mouse pointer in the appropriate direction (left and right to scroll through columns or up and down to scroll through rows) until the desired column or row comes into view in the worksheet area. Release the wheel button (or press it once) to stop scrolling.

If you want to keep your worksheet's column headings and row headings visible as you scroll to other areas of the worksheet, use the Freeze Panes command. Position the cell cursor in the cell below and to the right of the headings you want to freeze. On the View tab, click the Freeze Panes button and select Freeze Panes. To unfreeze the panes, click the Freeze Panes button again and select Unfreeze Panes.

Use the scroll bars to navigate to unseen parts of an Excel 2010 worksheet.

You can resize the horizontal scroll bar — making it wider or narrower — by dragging the button that appears to the immediate left of its left scroll arrow. Just keep in mind that you could end up hiding some of the workbook’s sheet tabs if your workbook contains a whole bunch of worksheets.

The scroll bars bring only new sections of the worksheet into view — they don’t actually change the position of the cell cursor. If you want to start making entries in the cells in a new area of the worksheet, you still have to remember to select the cell (by clicking it) or the group of cells (by dragging through them) where you want the data to appear before you begin entering the data.