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In my company, I got a new notebook with Microsoft Windows 10. It comes with natural scrolling support on the touchpad: Sliding up with two fingers moves the document up. So far, so nice.

Sadly, if I connect a mouse, there is no such option for the mouse wheel: Moving the mouse wheel up, moves the document down. This is rather confusing when switching between touchpad and mouse. Fortunally, I found the tool X-Mouse-Button-Control which can address this behaviour without admin priviliges.

Now all applications have natural scrolling with mouse button, almost all have natual scrolling with touchpad, but for some strange reason, the touchpad scrolling direction for Microsoft Office365 is changed by the mouse scrollwheel setting of X-Mouse-Button-Control. All other applications I tried are not influenced (as supposed!).

Seems like Microsoft themselves did not follow their own Windows programming guidelines, while everybody else did?! How can I switch off this nonsense behaviour?

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  • On all my mice, I can press and hold the roller button, lock it, and scroll up and down. Press it again to unlock.
    – John
    Dec 19, 2019 at 11:28
  • @John: In which respect is this related to the touchpad problem of Office365?
    – Philippos
    Dec 19, 2019 at 11:55
  • I lock my cursor (click the mouse roller button), the cursor changes shape, and then the whole mouse scrolls the page just like the touch pad gesture. For Office, I have to click and hold, so that Office is different than web browser. I find it workable enough
    – John
    Dec 19, 2019 at 13:02
  • @John: I see: You add another proof that Office behaves non-standard. Anyhow I'm looking for a solution to make Office behave like other applications. I don't like to adapt my workflow to different tools. I want the tools to behave like expected.
    – Philippos
    Dec 19, 2019 at 13:51

2 Answers 2

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My Windows 10 is offering me an option to change the direction for touchpads easily, but not for Mice.

I have reversed the scroll direction of these before with the Registry (Walkthrough)

Based on the screenshots from the XMBC site (which seems like it is here), XMBC can have many different application profiles, have you double-checked to see if there is a profile for any of the MS Office apps, or are you just using Default?

enter image description here

Unfortunately, this program is not open source, and based on the FAQ it is mostly just hooking into Mouse events. It is very possible that Office is just directly listening to those Mouse Events as well, and therefore not getting any modified events you are sending it.

Best advice would be to look for vendor options to reprogram, or work with your IT department on that Registry Walkthrough above (Like Logitech options for it's Mice, et cetera)

Changing Touchpad scroll direction with Windows 10 Settings

enter image description here

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  • Thank you for this, but I have only the default profile. And maybe you misunderstood: Office also gets the mouse wheel direction inverted, this part works. The strange thing is: also the touchpad scrolling gets inverted, although the touchpad should not be influenced theoretically. Now it is inverted twice for Office, which is wrong. Deactivating natural scrolling repairs Office behaviour, but is wrong for all other applications, so there is no combination to fit everything. But the registry tweak does the job, you say? I just don't understand why there is no user setting for that.
    – Philippos
    Dec 20, 2019 at 7:09
  • I mean...... could always just add a profile for Office apps that puts it back to normal
    – PsychoData
    Dec 20, 2019 at 15:30
  • Oh! I missed this comment last time! Of course this is a working solution.
    – Philippos
    May 7, 2021 at 11:02
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If you open X-Mouse Button Control and view the Layer 1 tab, then when you click a mouse button or roll the wheel the corresponding item flashes in the list of mappable events. If you 2-finger drag your touchpad over something like a Chrome window then you see no flashing, but if you do this over an MS-Office window then the Wheel Up and Wheel Down events flash depending on the direction of the drag. The same happens if you pinch on the trackpad to zoom in and out. So my guess is that MS-Office supports trackpad gestures by injecting mouse wheel events into the application, which means that X-Mouse will invert them if that's what you've told it to do.

So perhaps the Registry hack is the best way to invert the mouse wheel after all - I'll give that a try later and update this answer with my findings.

[edit] I tried the FlipFlopWheel registry hack. It changed the behaviour of my mouse but left my trackpad untouched, presumably because the hack only affects the HID associated with the device identified in Device Manager. I guess if I connected another mouse then I’d have to repeat the hack. But I now have “natural” scrolling in Office as well as the rest of my apps! Oh, and with the Registry hack it was sufficient to disable and re-enable the device to get the new setting to take effect - no need to log out or reboot. I discovered this by accident because I was disabling devices one at a time to find out which one was the mouse in my hand.

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  • Excellent observation!
    – Philippos
    May 7, 2021 at 10:57

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