Managers who use Microsoft Excel to manipulate financial reports are wasting on average about six weeks each year compared with users of other spreadsheet applications. The reason for this staggering loss of time is attributed to a commonly experienced but largely unreported phenomenon known as Scroll Rage.
Scroll Rage occurs when a user attempts to highlight a long, off-screen range of cells where the user must drag select from the start of the cell range to the desired end of the range, which can often lie outside the currently visible portion of the spreadsheet. Typically a user may only wish to scroll as far down the range as to the next page of cells however, with today's generation of high powered PC's, this simple task can often be extremely infuriating for users. Instead of scrolling the short distance to the next page of cells - perhaps as few as 40 cells down the page - Excel users often find themselves scrolling down thousands of cells with a slight flick of the wrist, such is the power of contemporary hardware. This problem is further exacerbated when the ill-fated user tries to scroll back to their starting cell whilst still maintaining the drag-select only to find that the target cell is often overshot again on the return leg of the scroll movement. It is not uncommon for Excel users to sit for several minutes at a time scrolling helplessly up and down their spreadsheets, covering literally millions of cells in each sitting. In many cases the frustration can result in users becoming violent.
The problem appears to lie deep within the coding of Microsoft Excel. Early spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 123 ran on PC's with significantly slower processors that today's PC, where the simple act of scrolling down a page was a slow, jerky, cell by cell movement. As computers became more powerful then spreadsheet scrolling became faster but at some point, estimated by experts to be around September 1995, the Spreadsheet/CPU equilibrium was broken and spreadsheet scrolling speeds began to spiral helplessly out of control. It appears that the program code, which lies at the heart of the the Excel application, dates back to a time when CPU's were much slower and scroll speeds were still within safe limits. Experts fear that until this code is updated to take account of faster processor speeds, then Scroll Rage is a phenomenon that is here to stay. Microsoft was unavailable for comment.
Scroll Rage occurs when a user attempts to highlight a long, off-screen range of cells where the user must drag select from the start of the cell range to the desired end of the range, which can often lie outside the currently visible portion of the spreadsheet. Typically a user may only wish to scroll as far down the range as to the next page of cells however, with today's generation of high powered PC's, this simple task can often be extremely infuriating for users. Instead of scrolling the short distance to the next page of cells - perhaps as few as 40 cells down the page - Excel users often find themselves scrolling down thousands of cells with a slight flick of the wrist, such is the power of contemporary hardware. This problem is further exacerbated when the ill-fated user tries to scroll back to their starting cell whilst still maintaining the drag-select only to find that the target cell is often overshot again on the return leg of the scroll movement. It is not uncommon for Excel users to sit for several minutes at a time scrolling helplessly up and down their spreadsheets, covering literally millions of cells in each sitting. In many cases the frustration can result in users becoming violent.
The problem appears to lie deep within the coding of Microsoft Excel. Early spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 123 ran on PC's with significantly slower processors that today's PC, where the simple act of scrolling down a page was a slow, jerky, cell by cell movement. As computers became more powerful then spreadsheet scrolling became faster but at some point, estimated by experts to be around September 1995, the Spreadsheet/CPU equilibrium was broken and spreadsheet scrolling speeds began to spiral helplessly out of control. It appears that the program code, which lies at the heart of the the Excel application, dates back to a time when CPU's were much slower and scroll speeds were still within safe limits. Experts fear that until this code is updated to take account of faster processor speeds, then Scroll Rage is a phenomenon that is here to stay. Microsoft was unavailable for comment.