Page 27 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

When you click the right button, however, a shortcut menu appears

onscreen. Get into the habit of right-clicking things—icons, folders, disks,
text inside a paragraph, buttons on your menu bar, pictures on a web page,
and so on. The commands that appear on the shortcut menu will make you
much more productive and lead you to discover handy functions you never

knew existed.

Tip

On a touchscreen, you can “right-click” something by holding your finger down on it for a second
or so.

This is a big deal: Microsoft’s research suggests that nearly 75 percent of
Windows owners don’t use the right mouse button and therefore miss
hundreds of time-saving shortcuts.

Tip
Microsoft doesn’t discriminate against left-handers…much. You can swap the functions of the
right and left mouse buttons easily enough.

Open → → Devices → Mouse. Where it says “Select your primary button,” choose Right.
Windows now assumes that you want to use the left mouse button as the one that produces
shortcut menus.

There’s More Than One Way to Do Everything

No matter what setting you want to adjust, no matter what program you
want to open, Microsoft has provided four or five ways to do it. For
example, here are the various ways to delete a file: Press the Delete key;

choose File→Delete; drag the file icon onto the Recycle Bin; or right-click
the filename and choose Delete from the shortcut menu.

Pessimists grumble that there are too many paths to every destination,

making it much more difficult to learn Windows. Optimists point out that
this abundance of approaches means almost everyone will find, and settle