Cool Mouse Tricks
Here's some swell Windows mouse tricks that you never knew it new. These have been around "since the wheel" -- mouse wheel, that is -- but they're still handy and hardly anybody knows that they exist. These techniques all work in "Windows Explorer" and MS "Internet Explorer" but will usually work in other Windows programs too.
Trick #1: "Mouse Scrolling" (or "auto-scrolling") - With mouse scrolling activated, moving your mouse scrolls the contents of the active window -- without having to mouse the cursor to the scroll bar! Very cool. You can tell when it is activated because a compass rose -- a circle with two or four directional arrows -- appears in the active window. The number of arrows depends on the number of directions that the active window can scroll.
There are three ways to activate auto-scrolling:
- "Click" the wheel by pressing down on it. It acts as a third mouse button and turns on the mouse-scrolling option.
- Click the right & left mouse buttons at the same time (this simulates a virtual middle, or third, mouse button.
- If you actually have a third mouse button, click that to turn on mouse-scrolling.
When you have mouse-scrolling activated, move your mouse just a tiny bit down. A down arrow will appear just below the compass rose and your mouse will begin automatically scroll down. Move your mouse above the circle with the arrows. An up arrow will appear and your mouse will begin to automatically scroll up. Moving the mouse to either side will scroll in that direction. The automatic scroll will continue until you position the cursor over the circle with the arrows again. And, the further you move the cursor away from the circle with the arrows, the faster you will automatically scroll. When you want to stop the automatic scrolling, just click anywhere.
Trick #2: Mouse Wheel Zooming- This is useful when you go to a web page with really small text or when there is a photo that you want to zoom in on. With mouse-zooming activated, when you move your mouse the window will actually "zoom in" on or "zoom out" on the content of the page. To activate mouse-wheel-zooming just hold down either "Ctrl" key and roll the mouse wheel forward or backward. The content of the web page you are viewing will get larger or smaller as you roll the wheel.
Trick #3: Mouse Wheel Navigation - This is like clicking the "Back" and "Forward" arrows on the browser tool bar, except that you move forward and backward through the web sites you have visited in your current browsing session by holding the Shift key down while you roll the mouse wheel forward and back. This one is a little weird at first but becomes second nature almost instantly.
