Section Two: The Mouse The

The mouse pointer can be seen in the form of an arrow on the screen. The arrow appears roughly
in the middle of your display. If you were to turn the mouse over, you would see a small, hard rubber
ball visible through a circular hole.
As you move the mouse on your desk the ball rotates. Deep within the mouse’s case are sensors
that keep track of the movement of the rollers. As the ball rotates, the sensors read the direction of
movement and send the information back to your computer’s serial port for interpretation by the
mouse driver program and this information is then relayed to the program you are running.
The mouse pointer can be used for selecting commands, accessing the menu, scrolling, moving
the cursor position and selecting data. Simply move the mouse pointer around on the screen until
it touches the desired icon, menu option or block of text.
The mouse can either have two or three buttons. The button perform different actions depending
on which program you are using. In Windows, however, the [LEFT] and [RIGHT] buttons are
usually the only ones used. Below is a brief explanation detailing the use of these two buttons:
Button Action
[LEFT] Used to select menu options or commands by pointing to the command or
option and clicking (pressing) this button once.
To get out of a menu, click this button anywhere away from the menu.
[RIGHT] Used to access shortcut menus within Windows and Windows applications.
The four basic mouse operations are moving, clicking, double-clicking, and dragging:
Moving Sliding the mouse around to change the location of the pointer.
Clicking Moving the mouse pointer onto an object and clicking the left button.
Double-Clicking Clicking the [left] mouse button twice (fast). This is usually done in lieu of
pressing the “Enter” key.
Dragging Moving the mouse pointer onto an object, pressing the left button and then
moving the mouse while continuing to hold the left mouse button down.