How to Remove Scroll Bar in Excel (3 Easy Ways)

Microsoft Excel, by default, displays a horizontal and vertical scroll bar. It allows us to go through the spreadsheet and scroll over the information on the screen. However, if you don’t want the horizontal or vertical scroll bar in your sheet or workbook, or perhaps both, enable or disable scroll bars as needed.

In this Excel tutorial, you will learn how to remove the scroll bar using 3 easy methods.

Here, we are using the following dataset that contains some students’ IDs, their names, marks of each student, total marks, and the percentage they obtained. The screenshot below shows the default horizontal and vertical scroll bar.

In this blog post, you will find 3 different methods to remove the scroll bar in Excel:

Using Excel Options

The overall configurations of Excel can be modified through the options of the Excel Options window. You can remove or restore the scroll bar using these options.

To remove the scroll bar using Options, follow the steps below:

Select the File tab from the ribbon.
Go to Options to open the Options window.
Select Advanced and scroll down to Display options for this workbook.
Uncheck the boxes beside Show horizontal scroll bar and Show Vertical scroll bar.
Click the OK button.

Go back to the worksheet and you won’t see the scroll bars now. Both scroll bars are now removed from the spreadsheet.

Note

If you want to remove a custom scroll bar created from the Form or ActiveX Control groups of the Developer tab, just select it and press the Delete button on your keyboard.

Read More: How to Insert Scroll Bar in Excel

Using VBA Code

Finding the options to remove the scroll bar can be a bit time-consuming in some cases, as there are several steps to do it. In that case, you can use VBA which can be a faster process.

To remove the scroll bar using VBA, follow the steps below:

Right-click on your worksheet and select View Code.
This will open the code window for the sheet in the Visual Basic Editor.

Copy the VBA code below in it.

Private Sub Remove_Scroll_Bar()
    With ActiveWindow
        .DisplayHorizontalScrollBar = False
        .DisplayVerticalScrollBar = False
    End With
End Sub

Run the code by clicking on the Run command or pressing the keyboard shortcut F5.

This will remove the scroll bars from your worksheet.

Removing Extra Scroll Bar with Split Option

Sometimes, users may have to split the worksheet to create a division or hide some unnecessary data in the database. This causes the appearance of an extra scroll bar. See the image below.

To remove the extra scroll bar, follow the steps below:

Select the View tab.
Under the Window group, click on the Split button.

You can see that the extra scroll bar is removed after this operation.

Read More: How to Adjust Scroll Bar in Excel

Download Practice Workbook

You can download the workbook and practice with them.

Remove Scroll Bar.xlsm

Conclusion

To sum up, you will learn the basic tactics of how to remove the scroll bar in Excel. Although finding the options to remove the scroll bar from the Options feature is a bit time-consuming, it has the options for displaying the scroll bars. Sometimes scroll bars can be an issue for viewing the worksheet, sometimes they can be useful for fast scrolling. So both the options to show and remove the scroll bar are necessary. If you have any questions or feedback regarding this article, please share them in the comment section.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I turn off scroll lock in Excel?

Sometimes, the scroll lock key (ScrLk) is not available on a keyboard.

To remove scroll lock, follow the steps below:

Search for the On-Screen Keyboard app in the Windows menu and open it.
Click the ScrLk key to remove the scroll lock.

How do I turn on scroll lock in Excel?

To turn on the scroll lock, follow the steps below:

Right-click anywhere under the area of the sheet names or the horizontal scroll bar.
Select the Scroll Lock option from the Context Menu.
This action will turn on the scroll lock feature if it is disabled.

Are there alternatives to scroll bars for navigation?

Yes, you can use keyboard shortcuts, such as arrow keys, or use the Go To feature (Ctrl + G) to navigate to specific cells without relying on scroll bars.