How to do horizontal scroll in Numbers on a non-touch screen?

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Level 1

132 points

How to do horizontal scroll in Numbers on a non-touch screen?

I just loaded an Excel spreadsheet into Numbers, and it came across pretty well. Unfortunately the sheet is bigger horizontally than my iMac's screen. There doesn't seem to be a horizontal scroll bar, nor can I find a mode which allows dragging using the mouse. I can reduce the size of the whole sheet until it fits the screen, but then it's too small to work with. I can't believe there's no way to do this, but I can't find anything in the Help pages for Numbers.

By the way I'm using a conventional 3-button mouse. Perhaps if I were using a trackpad I could make the scroll happen with multiple-finger gestures, but I can't really believe that a trackpad is compulsory.

Can anyone help?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on May 28, 2019 10:12 AM

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Answer 1

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Yellowbox

Level 7

20,383 points

May 28, 2019 10:57 AM in response to Living Fossil

Hi Living Fossil,

What do you see in System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars?

Try selecting "Always"

Regards,

Ian.

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Answer 2

SGIII

Level 8

35,282 points

May 28, 2019 4:53 PM in response to Living Fossil

I'm guessing that part of the problem may be that Excel document. Numbers can open/import Excel documents but isn't well designed to work with large, wide tables such as you sometimes see in Excel. You might consider revising your document in Numbers. See the templates at File > New in your menu for examples of good document design for Numbers. Multiple smaller tables on a sheet, as opposed to large expanses of cells as in Excel.

SG

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Answer 3

Living Fossil Author

Level 1

132 points

May 29, 2019 3:26 AM in response to SGIII

Thanks SGIII - I have every intention of revising my Excel document, since I have not kept up with MS Office and now don't have a 64-bit version and am therefore committed to Numbers for the future: in fact it will suit my needs well, as I am long since retired from making large dynamic models of businesses etc. where I stretched Excel almost to breaking point. The current projects are just domestic stuff.

The spreadsheet in question wasn't that large, but I included a couple of graphs that made it a bit wider than the screen. I am still puzzled that no scrollbars appeared when I imported it, but basically the problem has been solved. For good practice, I'll but my graphs on their own sheets. I'm hoping that this conversation may help others with the same issue. Anyway thanks.

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Answer 4

Living Fossil Author

Level 1

132 points

May 28, 2019 1:49 PM in response to Yellowbox

Yep, that did it - but I have never seen and never needed that option in all the years I've been using Macs (and it's a lot of years). Are we looking at a bug here?

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How to do horizontal scroll in Numbers on a non-touch screen?

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