Help! 123 Arrow keys move sheet view but not cellpointer 1

[MandyW]

I'm using Lotus 123 (part of SmartSuite version 9.6.8) under WinXP Pro. Inadvertently, I seem to have done something that has altered the behavior of the arrow keys, and it's driving me NUTS [g].

For a jillion years, since Lotus for DOS eons ago, I've expected the arrow keys to move the CellPointer (the location of the call where you can enter data). This morning, that changed and now the arrow keys shift the view of the total windows being displayed up, down, left and right, but the CellPointer stsys locked where it was (and thus is can totally disappear from view).

This applies to all workbooks (even a newly created blank one), so I assume that by mistake I have set my User Preferences awry (probably by unknowingly clicking on one of those inscrutable cutesy-poo icons that GUI designers love so much).

I've checked all my User Setup preferences twice and I can't seem to figure out what I did to cause this. (Help implies that scrolling behavior is set by the Classic Keys tab within user preferences, but no matter how many times I look at them, I can't figure out what's wrong.

I'm sure that this is a blindingly obvious stupid error, but I can't seem to figure out what I've done. Can anybody tell me how to get the arrow keys back to behaving normally?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

.....mandy

 

[danswindow]

Have you checked your Scroll Lock Key?

 

[MandyW]

Danswindow wrote "Have you checked your scroll lock key?"

I'll bet that was the answer! After posting my message, I decided to try the when-all-else-fails remedy for many software problems -- restart Windows -- and that fixed it.

It didn't occur to me to check the scroll lock key setting because an excruciating careful search of the help didn't turn up ANYTHING for keywords "scroll" or "lock" that mentioned that key and how it affects navigation. The explanation may well be there, but I couldn't find it. (Maybe it's stored in Write-Only-Memory for security [g]).

I've added a note about the scroll-lock key to my personal HelpMe files, where I record all the crucial stuff that the manuals don't cover and/or don't explain in a way that is clearly comprehensible to me. So if it happess again, I'll have something to jog my memory.

Thanks very much for taking the time to offer your suggestion. Even though I'd "solved" the problem by other means, it always drives me nuts when to use a workaround to fix a probme without really understanding WHY it happened (so there's no assurance that it won't happen again).

For a few hours, I was close to having a panick attack at the thought that my old reliable Lotus was "broken" and I might finally have to throw in the towel and switch to Excel. (As best I can tell, Excel's a perfectly adequate spreadsheet tool in the Visicalc tradition, but I have no desire to waste a whole bunch of time getting up to speed on all the quirky details on how its functions work,)

THANKS A LOT!!!

.....mandy