So I’m a lazy bum, but I need to use the Tab key quite a bit. (And why on God’s green Earth can’t manufacturers make a keypad with both a backspace and tab key on it? I can’t be the only one who does numeric data entry in Excel, can I?) I’m using a Microsoft Trackball Explorer (which I am very disappointed is off the market nowadays, because it fits my hand very well) and I decided to configure one of the buttons (specifically the “Top left button”) to pass a Tab keystroke.

There’s no IntelliPoint command on the list to pass a Tab, but there is one to pass a specific keystroke. Of course, that won’t allow me to tell it to pass a Tab command. Grr…

Maybe this is already obvious to you, but it felt like an inspiration to me: I set up the button to queue a Macro, created a macro (named “Tab” of course), and inserted the special action “Tab” into the macro. Save, OK, and an Apply later, and the button on my trackball passes the Tab command perfectly.

Hooray! (And this felt far better than the only results I could track down via Google, all of which involved hacking the registry.)