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Quick reference
Mouse and Touchpad Options
Set up the mouse and touchpad (if applicable) to work in a way that suits you.
When to use
We customize our mouse and touchpad settings when we want to use them in a way that differs from the default functionality.
Instructions
A mouse and a touchpad have default functionality. For example, click the left mouse button once to select a command. Click the right mouse button to display a contextual menu.
However, sometimes we may need to change the way our mouse and touchpad work. A good example of this would be left-handed users who want to use the right mouse button to select a command instead of the left.
Also, some people don't have a mouse with two buttons. Instead, they double-click the button to get the right-click contextual menu.
A touchpad can usually be found on laptops and it provides a way of utilizing 'mouse-like' functionality without having a mouse attached. Mouse clicks are touchpad clicks or gestures.
We can use both the mouse and the touchpad to scroll up and down a page by using the scroll wheel on the mouse or by swiping up and down on the touchpad.
Change Mouse and Touchpad Settings
We can change the way the mouse and touchpad function by adjusting the settings.
- Click the Start button.
- Click Settings.
- Select Bluetooth & devices from the left-hand menu.
- Click Mouse or Touchpad.
Adjust Mouse Settings
From this menu, we can customize how our mouse works. We can do things like change the primary mouse-click button from left to right, change the mouse pointer speed, specify how many lines we want to scroll using the scroll wheel, and even choose a different mouse pointer.
Adjust Touchpad Settings
From this menu, we can customize how our touchpad works. We can toggle the touchpad off and on, change the cursor speed, customize taps and gestures and control the scroll and zoom.
Login to download- 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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