Scrolling Windows

All about scrolling windows

Contents

Using the Arrow keys
Page Up and Page Down

Line by line
Using the "elevator"
One Screenfull at a time

What are scroll bars?

If your window is too small to display everything in the window then that window gets scroll bars. Scroll bars disappear when the dimension of the window will show all that's in that window.

The best example of this would be a word processing document window where the document is 80 pages long. You can't possibly see all that within one screen so, you use the scroll bar to move through the window.

Scroll bars work the same way in Macs and Windows. I'll use some screen shots from the Mac and others from Windows.

So you know what they look like, here are two screen shots, one with scroll bars, one without.

A window without scroll bars:

A window with scroll bars:

Where are the scroll bars?

How to use scroll bars

First, let's open a window and make sure it's got scroll bars. Take these steps:

Macintosh Instructions:

1. Open the icon of the hard drive by double-clicking on it (usually in the upper right of the desktop).
2. Resize the window so it's small enough that the scroll bars show up.

Windows Instructions:

1. Open the My Computer icon by double-clicking on it (usually in the upper left of the desktop).
2. Resize the window so it's small enough that the scroll bars show up.

Activities

Using the Keyboard to Scroll through a window

You can move through a window using the scroll bars or the keyboard. Let's practice the two most common ways to use the keyboard first.

Note: All these activities assume you have window open from the the My Computer icon (for Windows) or hard drive icon (for a Macintosh) and that you've made the active window small enough so that the scroll bars show up. If your computer is not in this condition, follow the steps above and proceed.

Using the Arrow keys

On almost all computer keyboards you'll find keys on the keyboard with arrow (sometimes called cursor keys). By hitting the keys with the UP or DOWN arrows, you can move through a document window.

1. Type the arrow up and arrow down keys. Then try right and left arrow keys

Note that using the arrow keys will select icons in sequence. If you're all the way to the right, you can't go further to the right....

Page Up and Page Down

On almost all computer keyboards you'll find PageUp and PageDown keys (sometimes abbreviated). By typing these keys you can move through up and down through a window.

1. Type the Page Up and Page Down keys and see how you move up and down through the window.

Note that "Page" is a misnomer. These keys move you one screenfull at a time, not one page at a time.

Three mouse scrolling tactics

Line by line

You can move line by line by clicking on the up or down arrows at the end of the vertical scroll bar. The horizontal scroll bar has left and right arrows.

As you can see below, clicking on the arrows will move you one line at a time. NOTE: if the area to scroll is just a little bit, clicking on the arrow you may not see much difference.

Activity 1 -- One line at a time

1. In your window with scroll bars, click on the up and down arrows to see the contents of the window scroll one line at a time.

Using the "elevator" to get around where you want

You may press and drag the elevator to move proportionately through the document. So, whether the document is 2 or 200 pages long, dragging the elevator half way will take you halfway through the length of the document.

NOTE: The elevator is not it's right name. But 'tis apt and so we use it!

Activity 2 -- That Elevator Can Be A Drag!

1. In your window with scroll bars, put the pointer over the elevator on the scroll bar.
2. Press and drag the elevator

This will allow you to scroll through the document.

One Screenfull at a time

Clicking in the gray area above or below the elevator moves you one screenfull at a time. This is a very useful tactic that lots of pretty experienced computer users don't know about! (What I mean by a "screenfull" is that if the document window is big enough to display 15 lines of text, clicking in the Grey Area (see below) then the display will jump 15 lines. If the document window has a screen of 30 lines, then clicking in the Grey Area will cause the display to jump 30 lines. This would be true no matter what the pagination.)

Activity 3 -- Scrolling a Screenfull at a Time

1. In your window with scroll bars, move the mouse so the pointer is in the gray area on either side of the elevator
2. Click the mouse button once

The elevator will move and you will scroll through the window one screenfull at a time.

Note that if you have very small areas of gray next to the elevator that means you can't go very far up or down.

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The Previous Step for Windows users

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