Keyboard’s Arrow Keys Aren’t Working in Excel (Scroll Lock ON-OFF)

It happens to me often when I try to navigate with the arrow key from the Keyboard, but instead of navigating to the next cell, it moves Excel’s Window. It happens in Excel Windows, but not that much in Mac.

What’s the Reason? Scroll Lock

Fix the Arrow keys in Excel (Scroll Lock)

If you use a PC keyboard, you might have the Scroll Lock key, so press it. It will disable the scroll lock, and your arrow keys will work again.

But if you are using Excel from a laptop where you don’t have the Scroll Button, you can use:

Fn + K

To turn off the scroll lock. And if you want to turn it on back:

Fn + C

You can also use the On-Screen Keyboard with the below steps:

1. Use the keyboard shortcut Window + S to open the Windows Search.
2. Type “On-Screen Keyboard” and open it.
   
3. You have the “On Screen Keyboard” open on the screen.
4.  Click on the “Scroll Lock” button from there.
   
5. In the end, return to the worksheet and use the navigation keys from the Keyboard.

Scroll Setting you must use in Excel

The best way to activate and deactivate the scroll lock is from the Keyboard or On-Screen Keyboard. But there’s a setting in Excel’s status bar that you can activate.

• Right-click on the status bar.
• Click on the Scroll Bar.

And when even you have a scroll lock activated, it will show a small message on the status bar “Scroll Lock”.

It helps you to identify the problem when you don’t have the navigation keys working in Excel.

Scroll Lock is an option to activate on the operating system’s level, not inside Excel only. But sometimes when you are working in Excel it’s gets on.

Written by

Puneet Gogia

Microsoft MVP — Excel · Founder, Excel Champs

Twelve years of teaching Excel, and a decade before that using it as a data analyst. Every tutorial here is written from a file I actually built.

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