[Solved] Can auto-scroll be disabled?

[gbcaflisch]

I am making entries and editing a large spreadsheet, with many rows and columns, on an iMac in OS 10.15.7. As I go down a column, the sheet will often scroll to the right so that the columns I am working with are no longer visible. This seems to occur at random, or at least I have not been able to discern a pattern of actions which cause it to occur. Freezing the columns does not seem to do what I want, because I do need to be able to manually scroll to display a different set of columns. Is there a way to turn off the unwanted scrolling and only do it by using the scroll bar or arrow keys? Thanks.

[Lupp]

(Disclaimer: I don't know anything Mac-specific.)

I would expect this behaviour only if steps of your proceeding expand the current selection including cells having a merged area to the right or left outside the previously visible area.
(Merging is evil anyway - with very few very well considerd exceptions.)

If you ae sure there is no merging of the mentioned kind in a column showing the issue, I would suspect user-profile corruption.

[RoryOF]

The Navigator (F5 key) permits direct movement to a specific cell.

[John_Ha]

Please upload a file showing the problem so that it can be analysed.

Press POSTREPLY and click the Upload attachment tab below where you type (128 kB max); or use a file share site, Dropbox or Google Drive for a larger file.

If the file has confidential material in it, you can obscure the contents without affecting the structure too much by changing every lower case alphabetic character to an " x ". Select all the text (Ctrl+A) and:

Edit > Find and Replace
Find box [a-z]
Replace box x
Options: Match case: YES, Regular expressions: YES
click Replace all

Repeat the above using [A-Z] and X to scramble the upper case letters, and [0-9] and 0 to scramble numeric data.

[MrProgrammer]

I am making entries and editing a large spreadsheet, with many rows and columns, on an iMac in OS 10.15.7. As I go down a column, the sheet will often scroll to the right so that the columns I am working with are no longer visible.

The easiest solution may be to use a different mouse when working with Calc. Older mouse designs only scroll up/down. You can plug in more than one mouse concurrently and swap back and forth as desired. An inexpensive mouse will be about the price of a large pizza and it will last darn near forever. This may be a case where you can buy happiness with money.

Is there a way to turn off the unwanted scrolling and only do it by using the scroll bar or arrow keys?

You're welcome to look in the OpenOffice Preferences dialog but I do not think you will find anything there which affects this.
Q00: Where are OpenOffice option settings on a Mac?

Thus you're asking about how to control the mouse on your Apple computer and you should be asking Apple or looking at an Apple forum. You will find results like these.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mac+disable+h ... osx&ia=web

People have created independent (non-Apple) tools to manage the mouse on MacOS. I can't personally recommend any since I don't use them myself and am not connected in any way with their developers. You're welcome to experiment. A web search will no doubt find others.
https://medium.com/ryan-hanson/how-to-d ... 51b90f8f1e
http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/index.html
https://www.smoothscroll.net/mac/
http://magicprefs.com

If you find a good solution, you should help your fellow OpenOffice users, the members of this forum, by explaining what you did. I look forward to hearing from you, gbcaflisch.

If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit button and add [Solved] to the start of the subject field. Select the green checkmark icon at the same time.

[gbcaflisch]

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to answer my post. The problem did turn out to be the Magic Mouse. I must confess that I was unaware of the mouse's horizontal scrolling function, as Calc appears to be the only application I use in which it does anything. I tried the various suggestions for disabling it, but decided that, now that I understand it, I can learn to move my finger in such a way that it is no longer a problem. Failing that, I will pull out my old corded mouse.

Thanks again.