Who doesn’t love knowing a little extra when they are working on a system? Knowing a few shortcuts or a few handy tricks makes the work easier. Performing a simple task in a different style makes us cooler than others. Isn’t it? Keyboard tricks are common and known to every user. Do you know you can do a little extra with your mouse as well? So let’s learn about 8 mouse tricks that you can use to increase your productivity.
Yes! The tiny mouse which is supposed to work for navigation purposes and has only two buttons of left and right click can do a lot more things than that. Seems like you haven’t given enough credit to your mouse!
Most of the time, people use a mouse to go through the folders and documents, select/deselect, or for the drag and drop function. If you are doing the same, you are underestimating your mouse and it’s time to use it to its full potential. Let’s have a look at the tiny tricks a mouse can perform. Some tricks might be known to you and some won’t.
1. Maximize/Minimize a Window or Close It
A simple and common trick you can do with your mouse is to maximize a window or minimize it. This useful function of the mouse is quite popular and a lot of people use it. This trick is usually known to users but if you still don’t know it, here we go.
To maximize or minimize a window, double-click on the title bar at the top of the screen. You can also go to the symbol at the top right corner and click on it.
To close a window, double-click on the window’s top left corner.
This trick will be useful to you when you are performing a task on different software or Windows. Without closing a program, you can work on multiple windows.
2. Select the Text using a Mouse and the Shift Key
Another simple yet popular trick. You can always select the whole text with a mouse by dragging across it but it is not apt when you want to select a text up to a certain point or character. In such cases where you want a particular text instead of the whole, this trick comes in handy.
Place the cursor at the beginning of the text you want to select and hold down the Shift key. When you select all the text you want, hit a click, and the whole text will be highlighted and selected.
3. Select Multiple Text using [Ctrl] Keys
So what should we do when we want to select multiple lines or words from the same text? Selecting them one by one would be a tedious piece of work. This is a useful trick that would make your task on the Word document more convenient. However, I must inform you that this trick won’t work on the online web pages.
To select multiple texts, hold down the control key and select the first text you want by clicking on it with your mouse. Again pressing the control key, select another text. Continue doing so until all the text you want to select is selected. Now you can see multiple highlighted and selected text at different locations of your document.
4. Select Vertical Lines using [Alt] Key
While working on an Excel sheet or any other table, the selection of text is not possible in a typical manner. What would you do if you want to select a particular column of your table or want to select the text vertically?
To do so, press the ALT key on your keyboard and select vertical text on your Word document. Like the above tip, this tip also will not work on the web pages.
5. Zoom In/Zoom Out using the Mouse
We all have seen the scrolling wheel at the center of the mouse, just in between the left and right click buttons. Many people don’t know the use or purpose of this wheel.
This wheel allows you to scroll up and down quickly on a page simply by rotating the wheel upwards or downwards.
To zoom in/zoom out of a Word document hold down the control key and scroll the wheel.
Scrolling up will zoom in on your text while scrolling down will zoom it out.
6. Open Links in New Tabs/Open Multiple Links
You can open a few links in a new tab simply by clicking on the URL. If you right-click on it with your mouse, more options will appear asking you to open the link in a new window, new tab, or in incognito mode.
An alternative way to do this is to press the control key and left-click on the URL and the link will open in the new tab. In this way, you can open multiple links on the same tab.
7. Open Context Menu/Extended Context Menu
While working in any program, you can right-click anywhere on the screen to open the context menu. The context menu has many options regarding the program you are using and at the end of the menu, you will find the properties option which will provide you all the details of the program.
However, some options in the context menu are still not visible while right-clicking. To see all such options, hold down the Shift key while clicking right with your mouse and the extended context menu will appear on the screen.
8. Drag and Drop
Dragging and Dropping a folder or a file is quite common and useful. You click on the folder, drag it to another position and drop it. The folder will get copied to the new location. Similarly, you can also drag and drop the Word document. The options such as move here, copy here, and create hyperlink will appear after dropping and you have to click the desired option.
So, these are 8 mouse tricks that you can use to increase your productivity. These mouse tricks will come in handy and save you time and trouble. Enjoy the ride with your mouse!
