That little wheel between the two mouse buttons

I was a client’s site the other day and he was mentioning how with his nice, new, big monitor he hated having to move his mouse so far over to the right of the screen just to click the scroll bar. Worse yet, he said the up arrow and down arrow of the scroll bar were miles apart which made it even more frustrating.

I told him to forget about clicking the scroll bars and to just use the scroll wheel on his mouse. I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t know what I was talking about so I jumped on the opportunity to show him.

The scroll wheel is that little wheel that rests between the two mouse buttons on many PC-based mice. Here’s how it works. While you’re mouse pointer is hovering over any window that has scrollable content, lift your index finger off the mouse button and rest it on the scroll wheel. Then slide the wheel towards the top of the mouse to scroll up and towards the bottom of the mouse to scroll down. It’s that easy.

If you have a lot of scrolling to do, many of the scroll wheels have an additional option that lets you push down on the click wheel itself (in other words, click the scroll wheel). An icon will appear on your screen with up and down arrows. At this point you can let go of the scroll wheel and just move your mouse up to scroll up and down to scroll down. When you are done scrolling, click the scroll wheel one more time to resume normal mouse operations.