Category: Excel

Excel: Don’t insert rows above a frozen pane (aka “Why can’t I scroll down??”)

Excel: Don’t insert rows above a frozen pane (aka “Why can’t I scroll down??”)

Yes, I’m Mrs Spreadsheet this week.

If you too are spreadsheeting, don’t do what I just did.

“Freeze panes” is a wonderful piece of functionality. It basically allows you to get column and row headings to “stick” to the top or side of a sheet, so that when you scroll through the data you can still see those headings. It means you don’t have to scroll back and forth to find what data you’re looking at. To make it work, place the cursor below and/or to the right of the headings, then select View | Freeze Panes | Freeze Panes. To turn it off, it’s just View | Freeze Panes | Unfreeze Panes.

But if you’ve done that, don’t insert new rows above your freezing point. Everything goes a bit pear-shaped. You can’t scroll down to the actual content bellow the freeze point.

That’s what I just did. I don’t recommend it. Luckily the fix is simple: View | Freeze Panes | Unfreeze Panes.

You’re welcome. 🙂

 

 

Excel and the flippin’ arrow keys!

Excel and the flippin’ arrow keys!

Coincidentally, I’ve encountered two problems in the same day to do with the arrow keys in Excel.

This one I’ve seen before, but I still had to look the answer up again.

This is about trying to use the arrow keys to move between cells (eg use the up key to move to the cell above the one you are in) (coincidentally this is the opposite of what I wanted to achieve before, which is move around the text inside a cell).

Problem:

Sometimes you get stuck – you click up, down, left, right, but you can’t seem to leave the cell you’re in.

Solution:

Press the scroll lock key.

This lives in various locations, but on most Microsoft keyboards I think it’s top right, next to the Prt Scn (“Print Screen”) button.

I know of no other application where this is an issue. But this isn’t the first time it has happened to me. I suspect my cat Crunch, who has taken to sitting under my laptop stand and stretching her paws out luxuriously across my keyboard, has been pressing my scroll lock key. She also likes to lick my fingers while they rest on my trackball mouse. This is half cute and half annoying. Above is a picture of her claiming to have no knowledge of any such thing.