How to right click using the keyboard

Posted on June 7, 2008 at 5:29 am

Looking for the right click keyboard command? It’s not often you’re left without a mouse, a trackball, or a touch pad, but there are those rare occasions when nothing works! Oddly, my touch pad died the other day, I didn’t have a mouse, and my computer didn’t have a secondary mouse tracking option!

It was quite interesting to sit for hours trying to figure out what combo of keys does what! Anyway, I now have learned several useful keyboard shortcuts so that I can use my computer without the need for a mouse device!

Image Source: Bristol

So how can you control the computer without your mouse? Well firstly, the easiest thing to do is use the ALT key and the ATL + TAB key combo. ALT + TAB lets you switch between programs and just pressing the ALT key on your keyboard focuses onto the menu options, such as File, Edit, etc.

You can then use the arrow keys to navigate the menus for a program and press Enter to “left click” on an item.

But what if you need to right-click in a Word document or right-click on a file to see it’s properties? The right-click keyboard shortcut is to hold down SHIFT and then press F10. That’s one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts because it comes in VERY handy and sometimes it’s actually easier to use the keyboard than the mouse.

There are some other handy Windows XP keyboard shortcuts that you should know in case you are stuck in a bad situation:

CTRL+ESC: Opens the Start menu (then use ARROW keys to select an item)

ALT+DOWN ARROW: Opens a drop-down list box

ALT+F4: Closes the current program window

ALT+ENTER: Open the properties for the selected object

There are of course many other shortcuts that are equally useful and I have written several posts on this earlier:

Keyboard Shortcut Secrets from MS Word

Windows Logo key shortcuts

Essential Microsoft Word shortcuts for more efficient writing

Internet Explorer 7 Shortcuts

Visually assign Windows keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys with Qliner

Hopefully, you’ll be a keyboard ninja after reading all of that! Enjoy your new keyboard knowledge!

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9 Responses to “How to right click using the keyboard”

Madhur Kapoor said on : June 7th, 2008 at 4:24 pm

There is also a button i keyboard which does the same as right click

Thomas Murphy said on : June 8th, 2008 at 5:42 am

I love the keyboard shortcuts.

Steve Yu said on : June 9th, 2008 at 5:05 am

Shift + F10 , I’ll remember that when my mouse is not functioning.

Yusuf said on : June 11th, 2008 at 2:02 am

Very useful article. Thanks

Alice said on : June 22nd, 2008 at 4:45 am

Thnkas so much for this. The two “clickers” on my laptop seemed to have died and i can only click using the touchpad at the moment, so i couldnt right click. I was really frustrated before but this info really helped!

yorick said on : July 20th, 2008 at 8:35 am

Thanks for the shift+F10 tip. I was looking for a way to right click using the keyboard and found this page through a google search. it’s to the point and useful.
Now I’d still really like to know if there’s a keyboard shortcut for creating a new folder (or file) in windows explorer. That would be super useful…

Lakshmi Narayana said on : August 5th, 2008 at 12:53 am

Nice website for tips and tricks

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