I really should not have to have a reason...

I used to consider the vertical scrollbar in Word to be an essential part of my "translator's toolkit," as it allowed me to navigate to roughly the same spot in two files without doing a lot of work.

For example, if I want to see how I rendered a certain Russian abbreviation previously in my English document, I can "Find" the abbreviation in the Russian doc and then use the scroll bar to go to roughly the same place in the English document.

(For those who think this is hard, or doesn't work—it's not, and it does. Repetition only improves the result. Consider that, back when I relied on paper dictionaries, I got to the point where I would consistently open a dictionary to within 2-3 pages of the page I needed, and I got to the point where opening the book to the precise page soon ceased to amaze me—as it did the first few times it happened. Like I said, it's a matter of practice.)

Another example is going on in parallel, as I tap out this post. When editing a file, it's be nice to see just how far through the file I am (instead of having to type "Ctrl-Shift-End" and do a word count), so that I can better control my time.

Then, a couple of years ago, the good folkmorons at Microsoft basically made it impossible to keep the scroll bar alive within a window (even the window that had the system's "focus"). No setting was offered to turn this "feature" off, because obviously, nobody on the Word design team could think of why a user would want to have an inoffensive scroll bar spoiling the clean look of the display.

And the Internet was not of much help either... until a few moments ago, when I found something that appears to work on superuser.com:

Alt-W-F
Alt-W-L-P
Esc

Now I can return to my editing refreshed, and fully aware of where I am (just short of halfway).

I had better get a fire lit, is what...!