Get to know your touchpad in 5 simple minutes !

Please, read on

A touchpad is a powerful tool for interacting with your laptop. With just one hand you can make your laptop do many things. Beware- don’t move on to this step until you have completed ‘Learn how to use your touchpad 101’ as you won’t know which element of the touchpad does what.

Some of the touchpad gestures are:

• Slide one finger along the centre of the touchpad to move the cursor.
• Tap gently to select or press the left button beneath the touchpad. Tap twice quickly to produce a double-click.
• Press the button on the right to right-click an object. To drag, hold down the left-click button with one finger while dragging the touchpad with another. Your laptop may have an alternative method for dragging, such as tapping down, up and down again.
• Place your finger along the right edge of the touchpad and slide your finger up or down to scroll. You might need to click the window or folder to make it active before scrolling. Alternatively, double tap directly on a scroll bar to snap it to the cursor.

Watch the video below to learn more. It is important to note that the video uses the term touchpad instead of the trackpad. These words both refer to the same thing.

A summary of this video about the touchpad

• The video talked about ergonomics- this simply means ‘setting up your laptop for comfort in the working environment’, so that you don’t get back ache or a sore neck. Find out more about egonomics by clicking here.
• The bittom right click produces a right click
• The macbook computers do not use right clicks- they use a different motion to bring up settings
• Two fingers at the centre of the touchpad also brings up a righ click on Windows laptops
• You can ‘pinch’ the touchpad to zoom
• You can also use three and four fingera on a touchpad to get results!
• By moving three fingers up, you can bring up the Windows tsak view
• By moving three fingers downwards, you minimise open apps and bring the computer to the desktop (The desktop is the homescreen of your latop with all your apps on it). A desktop is NOT the top of your desk on which your laptop sets. It’s on the computer display screen!
• By moving three fingers across, you can go back to the last app you were using!

It is amazing how easy a touchpad can make life when you know how!