Your favourite programs' best features are hidden in the right-click menu, Jane Hoskyn reveals how to make software even better with a click
Right-click a file in Windows, and what do you see? Save, Delete, Copy, ‘Open with’ and, for when you’re in an investigative mood, Properties. You may not be able to recite the right-click menu by heart, but you use it so often it’s almost auto-pilot.
It’s surprising, then, that we don’t make more use of right-click menus in other software. Programs you use every day have their very own right-click (‘context’) menus that contain useful shortcuts and hidden administrative tools. Even Microsoft’s own programs bury their cleverest tricks behind the lesser-clicked button on your mouse.
Right-click to edit faster in Word
Word (2010 and later) is easier to use than the mind-boggling array of Ribbons, tabs and menus at the top would have you believe. Open a document, select text and right-click, and you’ll see what I mean. The right-click menu grants quick access to all those editing tools you’ve struggled to find in the tabs.
These shortcuts range from the simple (click Font to edit the appearance of your selected text) to the "ooh, that’s clever" (click Styles, then Select All Text With Similar Formatting to automatically select any text in the document that has common characteristics - such as bold or underlined). You can also look up synonyms for your selected word or phrase from the right-click menu, and translate to and from dozens of languages.
Alternatively, right-click without selecting any text, and choose a font or format for the entire document. Click Additional Actions at the foot of the right-click menu, then Options, to enable or disable AutoCorrect habits such as automatically changing 1/2 to V2 (supposedly useful; actually annoying).
When you’re in Print Layout, you can even right-click to edit the space at the top and bottom of your documents. Click Edit Header or Edit Footer to add or configure information such as a page-number sequence, which is useful for keeping long documents organised. Press Esc to finish.
Right-clicking a file in Word’s Recent list is, by contrast, the very definition of disappointment. There are no Explorer-style options such as Rename or Print; just Open, Copy, ‘Pin to list’ and ‘Unpin from list’ - the latter two are pretty redundant, because it’s easier to click the pin icon.
Right-click to clean faster and safer in CCleaner
If you’re happy to let CCleaner run the show, all you ever need to do is open it and click Run Cleaner. But if you want more control over what’s deleted, you need a few right-click tricks.
First, let the Windows and Applications tabs populate as usual. Right-click a heading (such as Internet or Multimedia) and select ‘Check all’ or ‘Uncheck all’ to tick or untick all items in that category, or ‘Restore default state’ to let CCleaner decide what to tick.
Scroll to an item whose junk status you want to investigate (Office 2010 in our screenshot below). Then right-click it and click Analyze to see a summary of the item’s junk data in the text window. Right-click the window and select ‘Save to text file...’ to save its details to your PC.
To take a closer look at the junk, right-click the window and click ‘View detailed results’. Scroll down the detailed view and, if you spot a file you want to exclude from the clean, right-click it and click ‘Add to Exclude list’. You can investigate further by selecting ‘Open containing folder’, which opens the file in Explorer (if supported for that file type).
Right-click and select ‘View summary results’ to return to the summary view, then right-click and click Clean to remove junk files for that item.
Right-click to download anything from the web
You probably know a couple of right-click browser tricks already. We mention one on page 61 (right-click a blocked plug-in to run it). Then there’s the “right-click save” trick, which has been around since the dawn of online photos: to download a photo, right-click it and click Save Picture As (or ‘Save image as’
- it varies between browsers and operating systems). Likewise, save selected text to your clipboard by right-clicking and clicking Copy.
But what if the photo or text doesn’t want to be saved or even selected? Some sites protect their content by embedding safe JavaScript code that blocks right-clicking. However, this is the internet, a place where copyright is seldom respected, so there are free extensions like RightToClick for Firefox (www.snipca.com/16962) and RightToCopy for Chrome (www.snipca.com/16961) that override these right-click restrictions. Similar extensions, including Allow Right Click (no longer in Chrome’s Web Store) have been found to contain adware, so heed the advice in our feature here.
You can make right-clicking work without extensions by disabling JavaScript. In Chrome, for example, go to Settings and click ‘Show advanced settings’, then click ‘Content settings’ under Privacy and click ‘Do not allow any site to run JavaScript’. Make sure to re-enable it afterwards, or some sites won’t load properly.
RIGHT-CLICK IE WHILE YOU CAN
Internet Explorer (IE) is the perennial bridesmaid when we talk about browsers. But its right-click options are superb - so catch them while you can.
The menu differs according to the item you right-click, but in most cases you can create a shortcut to it, download it, print it, use it as your IE wallpaper ('Set as background') or attach it to a Windows Live email (this now opens automatically in Outlook.com). Edge looks to be a right-click winner, too, with the option to right-click a word or phrase and 'Ask Cortana' to tell you all about it.
REMOVE MICROSOFT'S RIGHT-CLICK JUNK
The right-click menus in Explorer and on your Desktop haven't changed much in years, and there are some you'll never use. Do you really need the array of Microsoft junk that opens when you right-click your Desktop and click New, for example? If you really wanted to create a Microsoft Publisher document, you'd open Publisher.
There's no easy way to disable these pointless shortcuts using the Control Panel (Microsoft won't give up its defaults that easily). Instead, you need a third-party tool such as the free, portable version of Right Click Enhancer (www.snipca.com/16953), which is really a suite of tools. Download and extract the zip file, run the program as administrator (by right-clicking, of course, and selecting 'Run as administrator') and then click New Menu Editor. Click Run if prompted by Windows. Right-click an item listed under True and select Remove to clear it from your Desktop's right-click New menu.
Right Click Enhancer also lets you remove unwanted programs from the 'Open with' menu; remove or disable right-click options in Internet Explorer; and add new options to many of your PC's right-click menus. It's a great set of tools that in total takes up less than 1MB of your PC's hard-drive space.
If you can't clear an item using Right Click Enhancer, try a Registry hack. Open Registry Editor by typing regedit into Start and pressing Enter. To remove an item from the Desktop's New list, click HKEY_CLASSES.ROOT and look for a file type (.ppt means PowerPoint, for example). Expand the folder and its sub-folders until you find ShellNew, right-click it then click Delete.