Limiting Movement within Your Worksheet

July 14, 2009 by datapig Leave a reply »

It’s always fun to be passive aggressive toward your users.

Here’s a new way to exert your impotent rage on the power user who’s always doing wonky things to your spreadsheets.

You can limit navigation to a certain range of cells. Here’s how:

 

Step 1: Press Alt+F11 to get to the Visual Basic Editor

Step 2: Choose the sheet you’re working with.

 

 

Step 3: Activate the Properties for that sheet by clicking View -> Properties Window

Step 4: In the ‘ScrollArea’ property, enter the range in which you would like to limit scrolling.

 

 

Once you’ve implemented a limit, your users will not be able to navigate outside the set boundaries.

 

You can also apply this via VBA.

 

To really make them feel like a monkey, you can hide the off limit columns.

This way, they get a safe little ‘play area’ where mummy and daddy can watch them closely.

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8 Responses

  1. Adam says:

    Ok, this is cool.

    Feel the awesomeness.

  2. Jon Peltier says:

    You don’t think this will make the true power users drop all else to figure out how to remove this limit?

    Aren’t you a power user?

  3. datapig says:

    Jon: I’m a super-duper-mad-skills-user.

  4. Jayson says:

    did they change this in 2007? In 2003 you had to implement this via VBA code, because the property resets itself when the file closes. I’ll have to check this out when I get to the office tomorrow.

  5. liverpool76 says:

    really cool
    Thanks for sharing

  6. Jayson says:

    So, I just checked in xl2007. To get this to work every time the workbook is opened you must set these properties programmatically. Unless I’m missing something. Silly that you can change the property by hand and not have it stick.

    Am I doing something wrong?

  7. DataPig says:

    Yeah…I’ve always considiered that to be a bug. You would think Microsoft would fix this issue, but as of yet, they’re a no show.

  8. judfepax says:

    I am the power-user but I do have the know-enough-to-be-destructive users, so this is a perfect partial solution for me–particularly for next year’s budgets.

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