Are you making the most out of every single mouse click you make? The navigation peripheral has a lot of hidden functionality that you might not realize exists. Today, we want to go over some of the ways you can make each mouse click matter just a little bit more, as well as how you can use these tricks to save a little time and be a bit more productive.

Using Shift with a Mouse Click

The Shift key helps you highlight text more easily in conjunction with your mouse. If you click in a text editor, hold down Shift, then click somewhere else, you can highlight all text between those two points. 

Double and Triple-Click

You may have discovered this trick by accident. You can select a word by double-clicking it. If you want to highlight an entire paragraph or sentence, you can instead triple-click. For more focused highlighting, you can double-click and drag your mouse, which allows you to highlight one word at a time.

The Right-Click

This one’s pretty basic and a staple in the office environment. Right-clicking opens up the context menu, which shows off different functions and properties of an object. The different functions vary depending on what you’ve right-clicked on, but this is where you’ll see actions like Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Print, Save, Save As, and so on.

Click and Drag

Need a quick way to move some text around? You can highlight text, then click and drag it into the desired location. You can do this in your web browser to quickly take something highlighted, then drop it into the search bar for quick and easy use without all the extra copying and pasting.

Multi-Select

If you want to select several bits and pieces of text, or select multiple different options from a drop-down menu, you can hold down Ctrl and click on each individual item that you’d like to highlight. If you hold down Ctrl while clicking on a link, however, it will open that link in a new tab.

There are, of course, more ways to utilize your mouse clicks to your advantage, but these are the ones that you’ll likely get the most use out of throughout the day. For more tips and tricks, be sure to keep your eye on our blog, where we write about business technology best practices just like this.