After years of idle curiosity, I finally found out what the "Scroll Lock" key on my keyboard does.

For the most part, it does nothing. However, in a few select programs it actually changes the behavior of the up/down arrow keys and the page-up/page-down keys, the most common (these days possibly the only?) program being Excel.

In Excel, with Scroll Lock disabled (the default), the up/down keys change which cell on the screen is highlighted. If you enable Scroll Lock, then the up/down keys don't change which cell is highlighted, but instead scroll the entire screen up and down.

Just thought you might like to know...

tanstaafl.

It'sthatbiglongkeyatthebottomofthekeyboardwithoutalabelthat'sbeentroublingmeforthepastdecade...

I'm pretty sure that spreadsheet programs have always been the main purpose for that key. Ever since VisiCalc and 1-2-3. You're deep into PC history there.

For terminal based interfaces, scroll lock would toggle the automatic scrolling of the screen when new text appeared. You could tap the key, and be able to stop the scrolling to be able to read something, without being interrupted by new text. When done, you would toggle it back off and scrolling would resume. Very very old use of it though, not sure if modern Linux distros respect this when running in text mode.

I find nowadays the only use for the scroll lock button is to move between machines on a KVM switch.

That's a darn good idea. Though, since I have no KVM at the moment, I just set it up to switch my keyboard layouts...