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Larilyn’s Tip of the Week: Scroll Wheel

Have you guys met my friend, the scroll wheel of the mouse??

Guys…..this little beauty is the unsung hero of the mouse.  Well….not that the right click or the regular click are sung heros…..uh, I digress.

Point being, EVERYBODY knows that you can use the scroll wheel to scroll.  Up and down a page all the live long day.  But did you know that there are other things that this scroll wheel does?

The one I use most commonly is when I am looking for something online.  Let me share a little secret about me.  I am indecisive.  I couldn’t choose a restaurant for dinner or a gift for a friend if my life depended on it!  So when I’m looking for something, rather than click on an option, then go back, click on a new option, then go back – I’d rather open up each option in a new tab.  Then I can look at them, ponder them – maybe bookmark them to look at later.  And the scroll wheel has three functions that really help me out!

When I find a link I want to click on, instead of clicking on it with the left click, I click on it with the scroll wheel!  This automatically opens the new page up in a new tab.  Then I can go through pages of Amazon, and have my potential contenders all left open, instead of trying to go back and remember what I liked best.  This usually results in me making a folder on my bookmarks tab labeled Gift Ideas that I then bookmark all the contenders to look at later.

If I have a folder of Gift Ideas that has a whole slew of options I’ve bookmarked, and it is now time to make a decision, if I click on the Gift Ideas folder with the scroll wheel, it opens every bookmarked page in that folder!

When I have finally made my decision, and I now have a plethora of tabs in my browser, I can just click the scroll wheel anywhere on each tab to close it – I don’t have to navigate to the X in the corner.

And this is why I generally don’t do too much online shopping and I just wander the aisles of Target instead.

Happy scrolling!