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Smooth scrolling comes to Excel for Windows

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Hello, Office Insiders! My name is Steve Kraynak, and I’m a Program Manager on the Excel team. I’m very excited to announce the release of a feature that has been highly requested for quite a while: smooth scrolling in Excel for Windows!

Smooth scrolling in Excel

We’ve heard from many of you that it can be difficult to scroll through a worksheet with large cells and view all the data. The main reason for this issue is that Excel automatically snapped to grid as you scrolled.

Though you might think this is an easy fix, simply requiring the alteration of a few lines of code, there’s actually a lot more to it. In fact, we learned that this change affects many different aspects of Excel, including freezing panes, resizing rows, cutting and pasting, filtering, cell styles, comments, dragging and filling, and more.

GIF demonstrating the smooth scrolling improvements for large cells in Excel for Windows.GIF demonstrating smooth scrolling

How it works

This update includes two important improvements:

  • Excel is now smoother during scrolling when using either the mouse wheel or the scrollbars (touchscreens and touchpads already scrolled smoothly).
  • You can stop scrolling partway through a row or column, and Excel won’t force you to go any further than you want (no more snapping to grid).

If you’d like to explore this big improvement to Excel in greater detail, you can check out my Microsoft Tech Community post.

Scenarios to try

  • Increase the height on some rows in your worksheet, then scroll using your mouse wheel or touchpad. Note that you can stop partway through a row without it snapping to the top.
  • Drag the scroll bar and observe that you can scroll with precision and stop anywhere you like—even mid-cell.

Known issues

Depending on the mouse or touchpad you’re using, you may not be able to scroll one pixel at a time. If you don’t have a “precision” mouse or touchpad, each movement will be based on the height of one line of text. If your Windows setting is to move one line for each click of the scroll wheel, it will move one line of text rather than one row of your worksheet.

Availability 

This feature is available to Office Insiders running Beta Channel or Current Channel (Preview) Version 2109 (Build 14430.20000) or later. 

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working properly. We highlight features that may not be enabled on your computer, because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Though it’s rare, we reserve the option to remove a feature entirely from the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Feedback 

If you have any comments or questions about scrolling in Excel for Windows, please send feedback by clicking Help > Feedback in Excel. We’d love to hear from you! 

Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right people.

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