Anybody else find it annoying that Microsoft Word doesn’t have a built-in function to scroll a document without moving the cursor? Well, no worries. Thanks to this guy there is a solution. Six lines of code, a couple keyboard shortcuts, and you’re good to go. Only thing I noticed is that I had to fully qualify “ActiveDocument.ActiveWindow” in order for it to work. (See screenshot below.) But then I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the code and keyboard shortcuts could be added automatically? Yes, I decided, that would be pretty cool. So I wrote this handy-dandy VBS script to do just that. The only hang up with using it is that you have to explicitly tell Word to allow the script to run. (Don’t worry, all this amounts to is checking a box.) Here are instructions for Word 2010, 2007, and 2003. The guidelines for 2003 should apply to most earlier versions as well, unless you’re still using Office 95 in which case, by god, upgrade already! After running my script, I strongly recommend you turn that function back off. It’s there to protect you from uncool code which can make your life miserable. Couple other fyi’s: (1) The script won’t work while Word is running, so be sure to exit Word first. (2) If you later decide you want to remove the code, just re-run the script. It will delete the code. (Or you can just delete it manually; it’s easy. See below.) (3) If you already have custom keyboard shortcuts in Word for Ctrl + Up and/or Ctrl + Down, they will be overwritten by my script.

If those warnings were too scary for you, you can easily add the code and keyboard shortcuts manually. Open Word, then press Alt + F11 to open the code editor. You’ll see a tree diagram on the left with a node that says “Normal” and a subnode under it called “ThisDocument”. This refers to the Normal template, which is the default template for Word documents. Double click “ThisDocument” to make sure you have the correct code window open, then just paste those six lines into the window as shown in the screen shot below (“Option Explicit” isn’t necessary) and click the save button in the upper left. (It’s the little disk icon, third from the left.) You’re done coding! Now you just need to add the keyboard shortcuts. Here are general instructions for creating keyboard shortcuts in Word 2010, 2007 (top half of the page), and 2003 (bottom half of the page). Ditto on the “earlier than 2003” comment I made above. Create shortcuts for both the ScrollUp and ScrollDown macros and you should be good to go.