Confessions of a hardware slacker

Today's post was written by Cathy Moya, a designer on the Microsoft Hardware team.

Confession time: I completely ignored my extra mouse buttons and keyboard hot keys until I decided to interview for the group at Microsoft that makes mice and keyboards, and then I had to cram. It was actually pretty easy, and within a few days of using all that extra stuff, I was hooked! Move over raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens—here are a few of my favorite mouse and keyboard things!

The back button  

If you have a mouse with four buttons, the fourth is usually assigned to “back”, which is like clicking the back button in your browser. Dive through as many links as you like and then click, click, click with that fourth button to follow the trail back to where you started. If you like going forward, too, you could assign that to a fifth button you aren't using. (In our upcoming Touch Mouse, it’s even sweeter—you sweep your thumb on the side of the mouse as if you're turning pages to go back and forward.)

Zooming and magnifying

I’m reaching that age where instead of buying cheater glasses I have my kid read me the fine print on labels. On the computer, though, I can either zoom in and out with my keyboard buttons, or use a mouse button to bring up Magnifier. Zoom works like changing the size percentage in Word or Excel, but it only works with apps that support zooming. Magnifier is really like holding a lens up to the screen, so it’s great for reading buttons and error messages. (Of course, if you have a button assigned to magnifier and keep hitting it accidentally, you can also turn it off or assign that button to some other command you like more.)

The calculator button

One press on my keyboard is all it takes to crunch my numbers. 

Changing my Media button

I almost never use Media Player. At work I listen to Pandora, at home I either use the Zune player or Media Center. I can remap my media button to start whichever app I use most. Read more about the Media button.

Lock workstation

When I’m running to a meeting, I usually have my arms full of my notepad and my drink and my laptop, so I don’t have a lot of hands left to lock my workstation console. However, if I DON’T lock my console, I might get a "taco": On my team, we have a quaint custom where if you leave your computer unlocked and unattended, someone will send an email to the team saying “I love tacos!” which is telling the rest of the group that you were careless and creating a security risk. To make it easy to lock my workstation, I just reassigned a hot key I wasn't using to the Lock Workstation command. One press and I am safe from tacos!

Macros

Macros are ways of automating tasks you do a lot. With our Mouse or Keyboard software installed, you can create macros that will play back a series of keystrokes to save you from typing them all the time. Why is that cool? Let’s say you use a command on the ribbon a lot. You can access pretty much everything on the ribbon by pressing Alt and then pressing the shortcut letters, which means you can put those same keys into a Mouse or Keyboard macro and play it back with one click or press. I created a macro to turn on Format Painter every time I press a mouse button—much easier than running back and forth to the little button to turn it on.

For more information about how to use all these extra features, download and install the Mouse and/or Keyboard software, and then look at the digital Help that comes with the software. Have fun!

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