Tech Talk
The idea of the Tech Talk section is to give our major contributors someplace to blab about interesting discoveries in the technologies they use. An "interesting discovery" is something generally where you have been scratching your head, or in my case pulling your beard out, trying to figure out how to do something (or what just happened) and when you finally discover the answer, there's a sort of "ah hah!" that happens.
Today's story:
It has happened to me before and I never could figure out why and it was driving me crazy. In excel (the Microsoft product) I was trying to go up one cell or down one cell using the up arrow keys and the down arrow keys. This feature normally works for me in excel, but it suddenly stopped working. If you google for the problem, you find hundreds (maybe thousands or tens-of-thousands) of people who complain that they have suddenly fallen into this pit themselves. And the answer to all of their questions: "turn off Scroll Lock".
As if that helps.
You might spend half an hour looking through your advanced excel settings trying to find something called "scroll lock" you can turn off. If you happen to have Excel 2007 like me, that might be hours of searching instead of just half an hour. But you won't find a "Scroll Lock" feature in there.
What everyone is talking about is one of those annoying, extra, and generally unused keys you actually have on your keyboard. Yes, there's a key marked "ScrLk" and guess what, it toggles some feature apparently built into the O/S which makes your arrow keys apply directly to your scroll bars instead of whatever application you are in.
Hopefully some of you folks now will stumble upon this actual post which actually has a real answer instead of the 1.N million posts out there that simply tell you "turn off scroll lock" as if you actually know what that means.
Cheers!
Kevin
