5 Mouse Tricks That Save Real Time

You make thousands of mouse clicks a day, and most of them only scratch the surface of what the mouse can do. A handful of simple tricks turn it into a faster tool. Here are five worth making automatic.

• Shift-click to select a range. Click at the start of some text, hold Shift, and click at the end. Everything in between is selected. It works for text, files in a folder, and rows in a list, and it beats dragging across a long stretch.
• Double-click and triple-click. A double-click selects a single word. A triple-click grabs the whole paragraph or line. A quick way to select exactly the chunk you want without careful dragging.
• Right-click for the shortcut menu. Right-clicking almost anything, a file, a word, a link, an image, opens a context menu of the most relevant actions. It is the fastest route to copy, paste, rename, or "open with" without hunting through toolbars.
• Click and drag to move things. Hold the button down and drag to move files, reorder a list, select a block of cells, or rearrange items. It is the most direct way to put something exactly where you want it.
• Ctrl-click to multi-select. Hold Ctrl and click to pick several separate items that are not next to each other, files, cells, list entries. Combine it with Shift-click and you can grab a range and then add or remove individual items.

None of these take more than a moment to learn, and together they shave seconds off the small actions you repeat all day. Pick a couple, use them until they are reflex, then add the rest.

Getting your team comfortable with the tools they already have is some of the cheapest productivity there is, and it is part of what we help with. When the basics are second nature, the work goes faster.

Book a call if you want your team getting more out of the tools they use every day.