Shortcut Keys for Scrolling Window Left and Right

Maury can press the Home key to go to the beginning of a line or End to go to the end. However, if he has a document with markup displayed, and he zooms in on the document, the markup will usually extend past the right edge of the program window. Maury wonders if there is a key combination he can use to scroll the entire window left or right so he can go to the left edge or right edge of the window content.

Most Word users quickly learn that pressing the Home key moves the insertion point to the beginning of the current line of text and pressing the End key moves to the end of the same line. This is, in fact, what Maury already knows. What he wants to do, however, has nothing to do with lines of text and the insertion point. It has to do with program content (generated by Word) that is wider than what will fit in the size of the program window.

Program windows are controlled by Windows itself, not by Word. This is why you can resize program windows to whatever size desired so that they can be arranged on your desktop. When a program window is too small, horizontally, to display the contents of the window, then Windows adds a horizontal scroll bar to the window. Click in the scroll bar and you can adjust what is viewed within the horizontal confines of the window.

There is no keyboard-only shortcut that I've been able to discover that will tell Windows (again, not Word) to move the content left and right within the program window. The closest I could come up with is that some mice—the ones with the scroll wheel between the two buttons—can be used to scroll content horizontally. If the horizontal scroll bar is visible, you can hold down the Shift key on the keyboard and move the mouse wheel. Move the wheel up, and the content should move toward the right; move the wheel down, and the content moves in the opposite direction.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12909) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.