What Is a Mouse?

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success and today we're going to talk about what is a mouse? A mouse is a computer device that allows you to move around the computer screen to manipulate whatever it is you need to manipulate. For example, if you wanted to do a word processing document, you would need to open a word processing program, and how would you do that? Well, there are two ways you can do it. One way is if you had a keyboard, and knew what keyboard strokes, what buttons to push, you could open the program that way, but the easier way is to have a computer mouse, and computers come with mice. Every single computer has a mouse with it. And you use this mouse to move around the screen. Now you'll notice, as I'm talking here that behind me I have a computer mouse, and I'm moving the cursor on the screen as we talk. And when it comes up close to an object, then that allows me to go over the object and then click, and that will open that object up. So if it's an application, a program, a browser, whatever it is, this mouse allows me to go around the computer screen and perform various functions to allow me to operate the computer successfully. Computer mice also have various functions attached to them, and you'll notice that these functions are operated by buttons. Now this mouse has three buttons. It has two on the top, and one on the side, and you can assign these buttons to perform various functions. So for example, I might push the left hand button, and it would automatically click twice on whatever I was centered on in the screen. On the right hand side, I might click and it would open up a menu that would give me choices. In the center I have a little wheel and this is called a scroll wheel. It's very common on all computer mice nowadays, and this allows you to move up and down a page. So if you have an Internet page, or a word document page, you can use this scroll wheel to move and up down the page instead of having to move the mouse up and down all the time. My right hand mouse button, which you see here, and when I'm holding the mouse, falls to where my thumb is, I've assigned that to do double-clicking so that it will automatically open up applications. So there are various functions that you can assign these buttons to and the programs that come with the mice, allow you to do this."