You’ve used a mouse for years, but do you know of all the neat little tricks that it’s capable of? We’ll show you just how much you can get done with your mouse.

Highlighting Text
You can highlight text by clicking and dragging your cursor over it, but what if you don’t want to do that? You can easily just click at the beginning of the text you want to highlight, scroll down to where you want the highlight to end, then click on the location while you’re holding Shift. All of the text in-between your clicks will be highlighted without dragging your mouse all over the place.

Use Your Scroll Wheel
Have you ever tried pressing down on the mouse wheel? It works as a button, too. You can close an open tab in your web browser simply by clicking in on the mouse wheel. You can also open up a link in a new tab by doing the same. While holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling up and down with the mouse wheel, you can zoom in or out on the screen. Similarly, you can hold down the Shift key and scroll down to move back to a closed tab.

Try Some Double or Triple Clicks
Let’s say you want to select a specific word. If you double-click it with your mouse, it will select just the one word. If you triple-click it, the entire paragraph containing the word will be selected. If you double-click then drag your mouse, it will highlight one word at a time.

Select Multiple… Selections
Let’s say that you’re filling out a drop-down form and it requests that you select an option. If multiple options available apply to you, you can select multiple ones by holding down Ctrl and clicking them individually.

Use Side Buttons
Some mouses have buttons on the sides which allow users to quickly go back to previously visited web pages or move forward. Many are also programmable so that you can customize these additional buttons to act the way you want.

Do you have any mouse tips that we didn’t put here? If so, submit them in the comments below.