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.

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