Whether or not you use a mouse with Quattro Pro is your own choice. If you are fast with the keyboard, you may find little or . no advantage to using a mouse. On the other hand, if the key-board is foreign terrain to you, the mouse may prove to be a very practical ally.
You can put a mouse to work in a variety of ways in Quattro Pro, but all of its tasks really fall into two distinct categories:
moving the cell selector about the spreadsheet or invoking Quattro Pro commands. Keep in mind that all the functions of the mouse can be duplicated from the keyboard.
Whether your mouse has one, two, three, or more buttons, Quattro Pro only uses the one on the left. There are three dif-ferent actions you can perform with the mouse:
• Po in ting: Moving the mouse po in ter to any part of the screen. For example, point to relocate the cell selector or choose an item from the menus.
• Dragging: Holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse. For example, drag to highlight a block of cells in the spreadsheet.
• Clicking: Giving the mouse button a quick click, gen-erally to select an item to which you are po in ting.
Try these quick exercises to get a feel for the mouse actions:
1. Point to cell C6 by moving the mouse until the mouse poin ter is over that cell.
2. Now click on that cell by quickly pressing and releas-ing the left mouse buttop.. The cell selector should be highlighting cell C6.
3. To select the cells in the block C6 .. E 14 (cell C6 through cell E14), hold down the mouse button and move the mouse pointer to the right and down (drag-ging). As you move, the cells will be highlighted.
Release the mouse button when you have highlighted the block C6 .. E14.
4. There is no action to perform on this block at this time, so point to any other cell, such as B1, and click the mouse. This will remove the highlighting and move the cell selector to cell B1.
USING THE TOOLS ON THE MOUSE PALETTE
Down the right side of the screen is a series of boxes that make up the mouse palette (see Figure 1.1). This menu is simply an aid for mouse users; it can be accessed only by a mouse. The first item in the palette is a question mark (?). Pointing at the? and clicking your mouse brings up the Quattro Pro Help screens, as though you had pressed Fl.
The next box, with the word End and the four arrows, moves the cell selector in the direction of the arrow ort which you click, as though you had first pressed the End key. Clicking on the right arrow is the same as pressing End-~ on the keyboard.
CH.l
(a)
Don't conf~se the two arrows Inthe zoom box with the upward-pointing scroll arrow above the vertical scroll bar.
The next four mouse palette boxes perform the same func-tion as the Escape, ...1, Delete, and Alt-F3 (@ functions list) keys, respectively. These are followed by three boxes labeled 5,6, and 7.
Together, these seven boxes make up the programmable items of the mouse palette. You can change the definition of each of these to suit your own needs, using the Options-Mouse Palette command (which is discussed in Chapter 18).
MOVING THE CELL SELECTOR WITH THE MOUSE Anytime that you have more than one window open at a time, you can easily move from one window to another simply by click-ing inside the window that you want; just point and then click.
Just to the left of the mouse palette is a vertical shaded bar called the scroll bar. When you click on any portion of this bar, the cell selector is moved vertically in the spreadsheet. Another scroll bar is located along the bottom of the spreadsheet. It is used to move the cell selector horizontally.
There is a small scroll box within each scroll bar. You can move the cell selector by pointing at the scroll box and then dragging it.
At either end of each scroll bar is a scroll arrow. Clicking on a scroll arrow moves the cell selector one cell at a time in the arrow's direction.
MOVING AND SIZING THE WINDOW
In the upper-right corner of the screen, above the mouse palette, is a box that contains two arrows,
i
andt.
This is the zoom box (it actually belongs to the menu bar that runs across the top of the screen) . It is used to expand or shrink the curren t (active) window. Try pointing at the zoom box (at either of the arrows), and then clicking. The window should shrink to about half of its original size. Click again to return the window to its previous size.In the lower-right corner of the screen,just above the mode indicator, is a tiny inverted L that is the resize box. To change the size of the window, simply point at the resize box and then drag
it to a new location. The lower-right corner of the window will move accordingly, thereby resizing the screen.
When a window is not full-screen size, it will be enclosed in a double-lined box. The window's path and file name will appear in the upper-left corner of the box, which helps you to identify each window if there are several on the screen. You can move the window to a new location on the screen by pointing to any of its borders and dragging the window to its new position (see Chapter 10 for more information about working with windows).
Finally, you can click on the close box to remove the current spreadsheet window from memory. This is the same as choosing the File-Close command. The close box is in the upper-left corner of the spreadsheet (not the screen), at the junction of the column and row labels.