Microsoft is now testing a smooth scrolling feature for Excel for Windows and expects to bring it to the stable version of the app soon.
“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,” Microsoft’s Steve Kraynak writes in the announcement post. “The main reason for this issue is that Excel automatically snapped to the top-left cell as you scrolled.”
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As Kraynak explains, it may seem like adding smooth scrolling is an easy fix. But as it turns out, doing so required Microsoft to make changes all over Excel, “including freezing panes, resizing rows, cutting and pasting, filtering, cell styles, comments, dragging and filling, and more”
Anyway, all anyone really cares about is how this change impacts Excel usage. And the experience will be smoother when scrolling using the mouse wheel or the scrollbars. (Touch- and touchpad-based scrolling is already smooth, and the latter even supports scrolling one pixel at a time with certain hardware.) And if you stop scrolling partway through a row or column, Excel will no longer force you to go any further than you want.
Smooth scrolling in Excel is available now to those in the Office Insider Program in both the Beta and Current Channel Preview channels, with version 2109 (Build 14430.20000) or later. It will be available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers in—wait for it—“the coming months.”
And if you are interested in the difficulties Microsoft faced in implementing this feature, be sure to check out the original post, which has some nice details.