Word 2004: Scrolling wheel is not aware of mouse pointer context

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 9th, 2004 • 12:44 am

I’ve already described problems with scrolling wheel support in Microsoft Word 2004 here and here. Here’s another one.

In Safari, as an example, the behaviour of the scrolling wheel varies depending on the position of the mouse pointer on the screen. If there are several things that can be scrolled through in a given window, the scrolling wheel will scroll through the one over which the mouse is currently pointing. For example, say you have a fairly long web page. It’s longer than what can be displayed in the Safari window, so the window has a vertical scroll bar to scroll up and down the document. But some part of this web page, in turn, contains a text entry field when you can type paragraphs of text, and this text entry field too can have its own scroll bar if the text it contains is longer than what can be displayed within the text field on the web page.

What will the behaviour of the scrolling wheel be in such a situation? Well, it depends on the position of the mouse pointer. If the mouse pointer is any area of the web page other than the text field with the scroll bar, then moving the scrolling wheel will cause the entire web page to scroll up or down. But if the mouse pointer is located somewhere within the text field’s borders, then moving the scrolling wheel will cause the text field itself to scroll up or down.

As well, if the mouse pointer is anywhere else (i.e. outside the boundaries of the web page window), then moving the scrolling wheel will not have any effect.

And this is exactly the way it should be. The behaviour of the scrolling wheel should depend on the context, and the context is defined by the position of the mouse pointer and by what’s currently active on the screen. (If the mouse pointer is hovering over an inactive window that has a scroll bar, moving the scrolling wheel will not cause the page to scroll up or down, because the window is inactive. You need to click on the window to bring it — and its scroll bars — to the foreground first.)

Microsoft Word 2004, on the other hand, is totally unaware of the context when you use the scrolling wheel. Or rather, the context in Word is defined by the position of the blinking cursor (insertion point). If the active blinking cursor is in the window of Document A, then, regardless of where your mouse is actually positioned on the screen, moving the scrolling wheel will cause Word to scroll up and down the document.

And if you have a document window that’s split into two panes, again, if the blinking cursor is in the bottom pane, even if the mouse is over the top pane, moving the scrolling wheel is going to make the bottom pane scroll up or down.

I find this rather problematic. Intuitively, to me the behaviour of the scrolling wheel is tied to the position of the mouse. After all, the scrolling wheel is one of the mouse’s controls. There’s nothing that “attaches” the behaviour of the scrolling wheel to the position of the blinking cursor rather than to the position of the mouse pointer. It’s not intuitive, especially when you have lots of screen real estate. I can have a Word document window open on my main monitor and have the mouse pointer on the second monitor and still moving the scrolling wheel will cause the document on the main monitor to scroll, if that’s where the insertion point currently is.

So the problem is not just inconsistency between applications (Safari and Word in this case). It is with the fact that, in Word 2004, the behaviour of the mouse’s scrolling wheel is completely disconnected from the position of the mouse pointer.


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