Controlling Scroll Bars

Polly Kummel,

When the Dummies book says, "The horizontal scroll bar appears just above the status bar at the bottom of Word's window - but only when your document is wider than the window," it means "but only when you've zoomed-in so far that the document is spread across more pixels than the window it's in.

Let's say you're using a display of the most common resolution, 1920 pixels across by 1080 pixels high. Let's also say you've "maximized" the Word window so it fills the screen from left to right. Your Word window is now 1920 pixels across. Depending on your screen's physical size, that works out to about 15 to 17 inches.

If your Word zoom setting is "100 percent" or "Fit screen," your page now occupies about 1880 pixels. Since 1880 is less than 1920, the window has space to spare. You won't see the horizontal scroll bar.

Now let's say that you zoom to 125 percent. Now your page measures about 2350 pixels across. That's about 3 inches wider than your Word window. As a result, the document's left margin, its right margin, or both are offscreen; probably some left or right text, as well. You should now see a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of your Word window.

Izzi Reynaud,
You can add the "Page Up" and "Next Page" commands to your Quick Access Toolbar, as I've done. (see Figure 1 below)

My scroll bar shows a little hollow gray box that moves up and down - but is often hard to see. Some apps have a solid black block that moves, and is much easier to see. Can Word's scroll bar be set to show a solid block instead of a hollow gray box?

Honestly, I am so frustrated. I have tried these advanced settings and they are checked to show vertical and horizontal scroll bars and yet they still don't show. Other comments elsewhere show that they will only show up when you zoom in but I tried that too and they are still not there. I also tried saving the doc and reopening Word but no luck.

You wrote this article recently, any suggestions for me??? Greatly appreciated if so.

For some reason the vertical scroll bar fades out after a few seconds of inactivity. How can I get it to stop doing that?

I am in Word 2013.

I'm hoping someone can help. I had to do a clean reinstall of Win 10 today, and now I cannot find my horizontal scroll bar in Word 2007 no matter what I do. Yes, it's checked under Options-->Advanced. Yes, I've told Windows not to hide scroll bars. The only way I can make it appear is to zoom up to 170 percent in Word, and that's no solution at all.

What's really got me stymied is what Dummies for Word 2007 says (and this is the only mention): "The horizontal scroll bar appears just above the status bar at the bottom of Word's window - but only when your document is wider than the window." I have no idea what "when your document is wider than the window" means or how to make that happen so perhaps I can reverse engineer the reappearance of my horizontal scroll bar. My margins are always set at zero, top, bottom, and sides.

Thanks for whatever enlightenment you may be able to provide!

Modern versions have lost some controls, as @Izzi Raynaud notes, but if you right-click in the vertical scroll bar then Page Up, Page Down, Top, Bottom, and Scroll Here (which is handy) are all available. The only thing they completely removed (or at least I can't find it) is the Scroll By Object button, so you have to use Go To for that now. Hope that helps!

I have MS Word for Macs 2016, after using 2011 since 2012, and 2004-2010 updates. I like several features, and need same format to "pop-up" before uploading Office 2019 fir Macs, next! The one feature I needed yesterday is the right hand slider "button" used to grant page number where one was utilizing. Where do I activate. Secondarily, I use the color green and got that changed, but did not take notes how to locate.

The options to move down a page at a time, which used to be at the bottom of the vertical scroll bar have gone. Do you know if this is by design (ie OTTB), or whether it's an additional option that needs to be turned on in Word? It's not in the above solution as options. Thanks,

Some how the vertical scroll bar moved from the right side to the left side. Is there a way to get it back to the right side once again???