I can reproduce this with LO 3.5.2 on 10.7.3 not sure though if it's a bug or just app normal behavior

Bug or not, it really is annoying :)

Thanks for bugreport
Suppose we use mouse scroll instead of track pad. The same result. On Windows and Linux. In LO and Firefox.
On Windows exit program that disables touch pad when user types something on keyboard. (Very useful thing). May be exist program that disables keyboard when user scrolls something using track pad?

I was about to add this ticket "Pressing command after scroll but during scroll inertia causes inadvertent zooming", but I suppose you don't like duplicate tickets. It's probably not a bug so much as an annoyance. This is confirmed on OS X 10.7.4, LibreOffice 3.6.0.4.

This is primarily because Command+Tab is the Mac shortcut to switch applications. I am routinely scrolling through a document and then switching to another app. When I return, I'm on a very strange zoom level. For a while I didn't understand why–it was confusing and felt like a bug. Now I understand why it happens and how to prevent it, but it still catches me quite often.

I see two options:

1. Hopefully Easy: Change the shortcut to Option+Scroll instead. There is some precedence: eg. Photoshop, Illustrator. The same annoyance doesn't occur in those apps.

2. Probably less easy: Add some extra qualifying logic to Cmd-Scroll. For example: Require Command to be pressed prior to the scrolling action, to trigger the zooming function. OR You could stop scroll inertia from trigger a zoom, in other words, only the physical scroll action plus a Command key press would cause zooming.

Thanks for explanation why it so important on MacOS X. Other os uses Alt-Tab for switching applications. And users encounter no problems. But MacOS X uses Ctrl-Tab. And this results in problems for users.

Yes, this irritating bug is still present in LO 4.4.0.3.  OS X 10.10.2

Still present in LibreOffice 5.1.0.3 on OS X 10.9.5
Really annoying!
Other bugs like "zoom on save" are obviously the same cause.

It is driving me nuts as well! I'm running LO 5.0.4.2 on Mac OSX 10.9.5 I made sure it was turned off in the OS under the Accessibility System Preference panel. 

What I observe is if I scroll up to the top or bottom of the document and then press the command (apple) button the document suddenly zooms in/out respectively. It appears the scroll action (from either a track pad or scroll wheel on a mouse) is buffered in some way by the program or OS when it can not be fully applied to scrolling the document. The remaining "scroll" action is then applied to whatever key is next pressed. So instead of using say command-s to save after scrolling to the top, the document is suddenly zoomed in to >200% and then saved.

Still present in 5.3.2.2, still incredibly annoying.  Sierra 10.12.4

It must be difficult to imagine this happening often if you're not a mac user, but it really does pop up all the time as the command key is a part of all major shortcuts. 

The entire issue is with the inertia from the scroll, as it's often literally impossible to know when the inertiatic scrolling has finished (if you're at the top of a document or if it's, say, a one page document and you're zoomed to 'fit to screen').

If it were possible to change the scroll/zoom shortcut to use the option key this would entire mitigate the issue.

This bug has been here from the start as well

Still present on

Version: 6.0.0.0.alpha1+
Build ID: 7e03c4eed72452fdfb87341214a21956c08ba969
CPU threads: 2; OS: Mac OS X 10.12.6; UI render: default; 
TinderBox: MacOSX-x86_64@49-TDF, Branch:master, Time: 2017-10-25_23:45:02
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); Calc: group

Yes, this daily (hourly?!) annoyance is still present in LO 6.1.2.1, macOS 10.14

This issue is the biggest annoyance I've ever encountered while working with LibreOffice.

I'm running into this issue more than 5 times per every hour spent with Calc, only because I scroll and press the Cmd key a millisecond before the inertial scroll has finished (e.g to copy a selected cell). I end up zooming the sheet in and out to stupid levels for no good reasons, to a point I can't see anything and have to reset the zoom every few minutes.

I'm no developer so I can't suggest fix but I'm stunned that this hasn't been resolved over the past 6 years.

How do other Mac Calc users cope with such a frequent and exasperating problem? Is Calc never used on Mac by developers so that only quiet users experience this, or just stop using Calc? 

Do other users wait patiently for the inertial scroll to stop, after forcing themselves to slow down their use of Calc to avoid this single issue?

Do other power users simply disable inertial scrolling at the OS level altogether? In my experience, this is just trading a huge annoyance with another and both are insufferable on daily computer usage.

More importantly, why would any one want one scroll move to turn from scroll to zoom in the same gesture?! How can this be helpful in any way? Why not stop the scroll as soon as a Cmd/Ctrl key is pressed? Is this technically impossible? If so, why not simply allow users to disable the "Cmd+Scroll to zoom" option somewhere in the preferences?

Please. Help. I'm as mad as hell and I can't take this anymore. I'm really considering switching back to proprietary software because of this one tiny bug :'(

I agree that this behaviour is extremely annoying in Calc. Please make that configurable.

This bug affects me on MacOS 10.14.6 (and earlier versions) with many LibreOffice versions over many years, pretty much every time I run LibreOffice.  Usually multiple times a day; it's the most annoying misfeature in LibreOffice IMHO.

As the original reporter states, it's a race condition between the (slow) LibreOffice handling of scroll events and the (fast) LibreOffice handling of keyboard events, which results in LibreOffice interpreting scroll events that were triggered by a user action 1/4 to 1/2 a second before the Cmd key press as related to the cmd key, and thus a request to zoom.

Since a *very* common action in office documents is to scroll around them with the mouse, and then, eg, use Cmd-C/Cmd-V to copy/paste between parts of the document, the race is extremely easy to trigger, hence many users running into it many times a day.

There is no good reason why an extremely rare operation (zooming) should be bound to an extremely frequently accidentally triggered keyboard/mouse combination (cmd scroll).  

At minimum there should be a configuration option to disable "cmd scroll zooming", and ideally the entire misfeature of cmd-scroll zomming should be removed entirely.  (When required zooming can easily be done from the zoom menu, and it's something users might want to do once or twice a day, not every few minutes.)

Agreed. Cmd-Scroll doesn't seem to be common for zooming on OSX - it doesn't do it on any other application I tried. Pinch zooming is the standard (which works on LO). Can Cmd-Scroll to Zoom be disabled on LO under OSX, or have an option to disable it?

Incidentally, it's particularly annoying when scrolling to the top or left of the spreadsheet, since visible movement has stops when it hits the edge of the spreadsheet, but inertia is still activating the scroll function.

I often inertia scroll to the top-left to check a heading total. The scrolling hits A1 and stops, the total is OK and I hit Cmd-Tab to switch away from LO, only to see it zoom huge as I switch away

Just another voice that I find this terribly frustrating — for me, most often when I'm trying to hit Cmd-S for save and suddenly zoom in to 500%.

Neither Excel or Numbers use cmd+scroll as zoom on macOS

Excel uses ctrl+scroll which is more sensible. They actually have the same exact bug as LO
Numbers doesn't let you zoom this way

Best fix would be to change the shortcut to ctrl+scroll as that would avoid most issues
Second easiest fix is probably removing the shortcut, but that may be annoying for people using an external mouse

This bug occasionally catches me out, and help requests on ask.LO indicate this continues to be a problem for other Mac users too.

Maybe developers see command-scroll as a feature, rather than a bug. Let me assure them that it is not!

I endorse eisa01’s suggestion that ctrl+scroll be adopted instead.

I’d add that although LO offers ample opportunities to customise keyboard combinations for shortcuts, there is no option to customise mouse+keyboard behaviour. There are a couple of mouse-related items in Preferences --> Libre Office > View, but that’s all, as far as I can see.

If it’s not fixed in LO 7, can we make it a priority request for LO 8 at the latest?

This may not help Mac users, but I have created some software that helps to prevent unwanted zooming when using X Window System: https://github.com/jarnos/block-scroll-mod-x11
(Not restricted to LO.)

10.5 years on since first report here, and still an issue. That's not reassuring. Still an issue in LibreOffice 7.4.0.3 on OSX 10.15.7. Am trying to make the switch from Word to LibreOffice Writer and this is absolutely maddening; I can't go more than a few minutes before I'm hitting a keyboard command (copy, cut, paste, save, etc) and suddenly I'm zoomed in to >400%. Have to stop everything to get zoomed back to the correct amount, and then I can proceed with workflow.

I completely agree with the recommendation to switch from Cmd to Ctrl for zooming, as this is the only OSX application I have ever encountered that uses the Cmd-scroll combination, and it is a definite liability.

I find LibreOffice to be a great productivity suite. Just a few annoying UI bugs might spoil this impression for quite a lot of users.

From a usability perspective, an ongoing event such as scrolling should not be altered by a key-press in between. I don't think that there is a use-case where one wants to switch from "scroll" to "magnify" during ease-out.

Isn't it a quick-fix, to consider the key-press only when it occured before event-start?

Is there any motion on fixing this? I spend some time (luckily not 100% my work time) in Calc and usually doing scrolling and copy/pasting (thus cmd+c/v) and I feel like I'm in some bizarre place with LO constantly switching zoom...

This needs to be fixed. Half of the time I spent in LO is consumed by resetting the zoom. Really, really annoying.

This is still present, and it would really hurt productivity if you tried to use LO professionally so raising importance

So this should either be fixed, or the shortcut changed to ctrl+scroll to match Excel. Excel also switch to zooming during inertial scrolling, but ctrl is a much less used modifier key on macOS

So a super quick fix would be to change the shortcut key to ctrl+scroll