Mouse and Trackpad Options

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the options that we have for
• 00:08 setting up our mouse and touchpad, so that they work best for us.
• 00:11 Because not everybody uses a mouse or a touchpad in the same way.
• 00:16 Now, when I say touchpad, also known as a trackpad,
• 00:19 it might be that you don't have a device that has one of those.
• 00:23 They're most commonly found on laptops.
• 00:25 And it's that big pad in the middle that you can use with your finger
• 00:30 instead of using a clickable mouse.
• 00:32 So if you use a laptop, then that's going to be relevant for you.
• 00:35 But if you don't, if you use a PC, like I'm using here, you're probably not
• 00:39 going to have a touchpad, unless you have an external one attached,
• 00:42 you're probably going to be using a mouse, instead.
• 00:44 So just bear that in mind when we take a look at these settings.
• 00:47 Now, when it comes to things like your mouse,
• 00:50 not everybody uses their mouse in the same way.
• 00:53 As we all know, the default functionality for a regular,
• 00:57 standard mouse with two buttons is that in order to click or
• 01:01 select items in Windows, we click once with the left-hand mouse button.
• 01:06 And if we want to maybe pull up a contextual menu,
• 01:08 we'll use the right-hand click on the mouse.
• 01:11 But we can, of course, completely change this.
• 01:14 And this is quite useful, particularly if you are a left-handed user,
• 01:17 you might want to switch around the way that those buttons operate.
• 01:20 So that the right-hand click is your main selection and
• 01:24 the left-hand click brings up the, effectively, right click menu.
• 01:29 Similarly, if you use a touchpad on a laptop, in general, you tap once to
• 01:33 select things or you might double tap if you want to open an application or
• 01:38 highlight a piece of text.
• 01:40 And those things are called gestures when we're talking about a touchpad.
• 01:44 Now, we can modify the gestures that we use.
• 01:46 So if we prefer to double tap to select something as opposed to single tap,
• 01:50 we can change that in settings.
• 01:52 So let's take a look at where all of these settings for our mouse and
• 01:56 our touchpad live.
• 01:58 Once again, we're going to find those in settings,
• 02:01 because we have it as a shortcut in our taskbar.
• 02:04 Once again, really straightforward to pull this up.
• 02:07 Now, if you're currently looking through that left-hand menu, looking for
• 02:10 where it says mouse and touchpad, you're not going to find it.
• 02:12 And that's because these options live underneath where we were previously,
• 02:17 Bluetooth and Devices.
• 02:19 And if we scroll all the way down, this is where we're going to find our settings for
• 02:23 our mouse and also the touchpad.
• 02:25 So let's click on Mouse to expand this one.
• 02:29 So we can now go through and adjust our settings accordingly.
• 02:33 Now, I tend to use my mouse in a fairly standard way.
• 02:35 I have a regular mouse that has two buttons, and it also has a scroll wheel.
• 02:41 So I don't do anything particularly interesting in the settings here in order
• 02:45 to customize my mouse, because I pretty much use it as it comes.
• 02:48 But take a look at the first option, Primary mouse button.
• 02:51 So that's the one that you're using all the time.
• 02:54 The standard here is to use the left mouse click as your default, and
• 02:58 you can see that that's exactly what I have set.
• 03:01 But if you want to change that, if you're a left-handed user,
• 03:04 you can change it to use the right mouse click as your primary mouse button.
• 03:08 We can also change the Mouse pointer speed.
• 03:10 So that really refers to the speed that the mouse moves around your screen.
• 03:15 So mine's just kind of in the middle there, not particularly fast,
• 03:18 not particularly slow.
• 03:19 I could increase this, and you can see as I'm doing the same hand movement,
• 03:23 it has increased its speed.
• 03:25 Now, for me that's a little bit too much.
• 03:27 So I'm going to take that back down to that middle point.
• 03:30 But adjust this according to your own preferences.
• 03:32 We then have a section here where we can customize the scroll wheel on our mouse if
• 03:37 we have one.
• 03:38 Again, not all mice have a scroll wheel, most do these days.
• 03:42 And we can customize exactly how many lines we move down when we
• 03:47 scroll the wheel on our mouse.
• 03:49 So mine moves down multiple lines at a time, but
• 03:52 I could change this to move down one screen at a time when I scroll the wheel.
• 03:56 Again, I can adjust the lines to scroll at a time.
• 03:59 And I also have this last setting turned on,
• 04:02 Scroll inactive windows when hovering over them.
• 04:05 Now, if you take a look at the bottom here, we have Related settings.
• 04:08 So if we click on this to open it up,
• 04:10 it's going to open up one of those old school windows menus.
• 04:14 And you'll find this with some of the settings, not all of them,
• 04:17 have been transferred across to this more modern look and feel.
• 04:20 Sometimes you'll click and it will open a very old looking window.
• 04:25 And this gives us a good opportunity to really see the advances that Windows has
• 04:28 made over the last few years.
• 04:30 This really does look quite old school when compared to this new
• 04:33 modern interface.
• 04:34 But we can come in here and
• 04:36 make more advanced changes to the way that our mouse works.
• 04:41 For example, I could go to Pointers, and I could choose to use a different pointer.
• 04:46 So I have the normal default arrow, you can see it just there.
• 04:50 But I could choose to customize this and use other mouse pointers.
• 04:56 I've got some pointer options, again, that I can adjust in here.
• 05:00 I've got some wheel options, again, that relates to scrolling.
• 05:03 And then we have some final hardware options,
• 05:05 which you're probably not going to really have to go into.
• 05:08 But just be aware of that, we have some related settings.
• 05:11 And once again, right at the bottom, Mouse pointer size and color.
• 05:16 So again, if you don't particularly like this fairly standard white mouse pointer,
• 05:20 you could choose to jazz that up a bit and
• 05:22 maybe have something a little bit more custom, like this bright green.
• 05:26 And notice that we could change that to a pink, if we wanted to.
• 05:30 And I actually think that's quite nice.
• 05:31 I'm probably going to change this after this training course.
• 05:34 For the time being, not to confuse everyone, let's put it back to white.
• 05:38 I can also change the size.
• 05:40 So again, if I want to make that really big, I can do that.
• 05:43 That is a bit too much for me.
• 05:45 Let's take it all the way back down.
• 05:48 But just be aware of the types of settings that you can customize in here.
• 05:52 Now once again, I'm going to go back and I'm going to use the back arrow this time,
• 05:55 which is going to take me back to that main Mouse window.
• 05:58 Click it again and I get back to my Bluetooth & devices.
• 06:02 Because this time, we're just going to briefly take a look at the settings that
• 06:06 we can change for our touchpad if we have one.
• 06:08 And even if you have a touchpad on your laptop,
• 06:11 you don't necessarily have to use it.
• 06:13 You can completely toggle this off.
• 06:15 Now, this can be quite useful because I know a lot of the time,
• 06:19 if I have my touchpad turned on, sometimes when I'm moving my keyboard around or
• 06:23 even if I'm just typing.
• 06:25 Parts of my hand will accidentally brush against the touchpad and
• 06:29 something will happen on my system.
• 06:31 So sometimes if I am doing a lot of typing, I do like to come in here and
• 06:34 toggle the touchpad off.
• 06:36 Once again, we can adjust our cursor speed, and
• 06:39 we can also adjust our gestures or our taps.
• 06:41 So this is where we can customize exactly how sensitive that touchpad is, and
• 06:46 if we want to tap with a single finger to single-click,
• 06:49 two fingers to right-click, so on and so forth.
• 06:52 We can even customize our gestures.
• 06:55 So if we want to do three finger swipes to activate some things,
• 06:59 we can set that up in here, as well.
• 07:02 And once again, at the bottom, we have more touchpad settings,
• 07:04 which again is going to open up that kind of old school-looking menu.
• 07:08 And we also have advanced gestures in here.
• 07:10 So if you're really into using your touchpad to do three finger gestures,
• 07:14 maybe you like to pinch and expand, things like that, this is exactly where you
• 07:19 can come to customize exactly what those gestures are going to do.
• 07:23 So that is where you're going to find all of your mouse and touchpad settings.
• 07:27 Definitely worth going through and adjusting, accordingly.

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