Now that you know how to click a mouse, let’s look at the double click.

The purpose of the double click is to not simply select an item that you see displayed on the screen, but to activate it as well. This may also be termed as opening, or perhaps running the item that you see displayed.

To double click your mouse, it’s simply a matter of doing two clicks, very quickly. You should try to do a double click in less than a half-second. Just use your finger on the mouse as before, and go press-release press-release. Exactly the same as for your single click, but twice.

 

Now, choose something that you see on your desktop, and try it. Perhaps the icon representing your computer; on Windows computers this will be labeled as “My Computer” When you double click this, it should open a Windows Explorer window.

Repeat this a few times until it becomes comfortable and second nature for you.

If we review our mouse-click operation, you simply pressed the mouse button, and then immediately released it. But what happens if you don’t immediately release it? What happens if, instead of immediately releasing the mouse button, you then move your mouse around?

This is actually a good thing to do, because it can let you select more than one thing at a time. If you are working in a word processing program, and you need to, say, change the font on a whole paragraph, this is how you would do it: you would position the mouse just before the start of the paragraph, push the mouse button down, move the mouse to just after the end of the paragraph, and then release the mouse button. Why not try that now, on this paragraph?

Or the paragraph before it? Or the one following it? Easy, isn’t it?

What’s really of interest here us the fact that this technique can actually be used for a variety of different tasks. We’ve already seen how it can be used to select a bunch of text, be that bunch just one word, a phrase, a sentence, or a paragraph.

Or even a whole document!

But in some cases, you can also use it to select a number of different things, like a group of icons on your desktop, or, in applications like photoshop, a section of an image, or maybe even a bunch of images that you’d like to do something with.