Tip #23 - Scrolling wheel – scrolling left and right and then some!

100 Computer Tips in 100 Days

Tip #23 - Scrolling wheel – scrolling left and right and then some!

Since the scrolling wheel was introduced to the mouse, scrolling has become so much easier. You don’t have to move the mouse on the scrolling bar on the window to go up or down. The scrolling wheel also allows you to scroll horizontally, left or right, but that’s not obvious at all.

To activate the left/right feature you have to click the scrolling wheel, that’s right, the scrolling wheel is also a button! When you click the scrolling wheel you will see the icon pictured here. Now move your mouse (without clicking anything) just above, below, to the left or to the right of the icon. The further you move away from the icon the faster you scroll, so watch out! To turn off the scrolling, click the scrolling wheel again.

Sorry to say I haven’t been able to find anyway to accomplish this on laptops with track pads or on Apple mice, although Apple’s new Magic Mouse allows you to swipe left and right to scroll.

This button is especially helpful in Excel or webpages that require a left right scroll.

Some other uses of the Scrolling Wheel:

Close Browser Tabs Quickly

I routinely have many tabs open in my browser at any given time. If I want to close a tab, I have to click it, then click the little x that appears on the tab. That's one more click than I prefer, and it makes a tab active that I'm planning to close anyway. Crazy, right?

If you wheel-click any tab in your browser, boom, it's gone. No need to make it active first, no need to click on the “x”. Just wheel-click, and, boom, it’s closed.

Open Links in a New Tab

When you wheel-click a link in most browsers, that link opens immediately in a new tab rather than changing the content of the current tab. This is especially important when you’re comparing items and want to move back and forth between tabs.

Incidentally, you can accomplish the same thing by holding down the Ctrl key and left-clicking a link. But why bother with that when you can just as easily click the middle mouse button?

Happy computing!