Tip of the Week - Mouse Buttons

People often come to me and ask ... why don’t Macs have a right-click button on the mouse.

Truth is...Macs have always had a right click. So why don’t you see the button? Well, Apple loves to design things to look and feel sleek, smooth, elegant. So putting cracks in the mouse so that there were two distinct buttons just never appealed to Apple. But the buttons are still there! The mouse on your iMac or eMac can tell where you click with your finger. If you click on the left side, one thing happens. Click on the right, a different thing.

However, you can control what that thing is! If you go into your System Preferences and look for the Mouse preferences, you’ll see a window that includes this...

As you can tell, this mouse actually has FOUR buttons. And each button can be controlled here with a pop-up menu. You can select what each button does.

So don’t hesitate to customize your mouse and take full advantage of your mouse button options.

By the way...on some mice, there really are not multiple buttons. On all the ones made by Apple in the last few years...yes. But sometimes we buy less expensive replacements that really are single button mice. And on some older Apple mice, there was only one button on the mouse. But does that mean those folks did not have a right click??

Fear not! You still have access to both a left click and a right click. When you click the mouse button, that is your left click. If you hold down the CONTROL key while clicking the mouse button, you get a right click.