Drag and Drop - Dragon Naturally Speaking V12 - Speech Input

Drag and Drop Using Dragon Naturally Speaking

As this is blog post number 50, I want to write about something that is fittingly simple and funky. So, today I'm going to depart from the usual magnification and speech output fun and pass the baton over instead to the increasingly fashionable speech input zone, specifically the mighty Dragon Naturally Speaking. In this post I'm going to cover how you move objects around your Desktop using Dragon's mouse commands - while it sounds a bit arcane, it's not as tricky as you might imagine.

Understanding the Mousegrid

Dragon has a whole bunch of different voice commands that allow you to control the mouse and I will be visiting those in a future post. However, the drag and drop approach I want to discuss here, relies on the Dragon "mousegrid" feature.

What is the mousegrid? Well, while you can move the mouse pointer around by itself in Dragon, this does get pretty tedious as you wait on the pointer travelling to the right location. Sure, you can make it travel a bit faster and so on but, for any mouse user of old, this process will feel excruciatingly restrictive. If you don't believe me, try using these manual mouse move commands to do everything. Take it from me, it won't take long before that frustration starts to kick in...

The solution to this frustration is to use the mousegrid option, this is where Dragon splits the screen into a numbered 3 x 3 grid. The idea is that you specify a number, with Dragon then applying a further smaller 3 x 3 grids, which you then use to specify another number and so on. Eventually, the mousegrid is so small the mouse pointer is pointing at one tiny area of the screen - which is, hopefully, over the object you need to "click" on!

The mousegrid voice command comes in two flavours, these are:

• Say "MOUSEGRID" - this command applies a mouse grid to the whole screen.
• Say "MOUSEGRID WINDOW" - this command applies a mousegrid but only to the currently active window.

Each of these mousegrid options can also be turned on and off using the following voice commands:

• To scrub the last mousegrid command use "UNDO THAT"
• To close the mousegrid mode completely, use "CANCEL"

Let's run through a typical mousegrid example, this is me using this approach to activate the Bold command in MS Word 2007:

1. Say "MOUSEGRID WINDOW"
2. Say "1"
3. Say "2"
4. Say "7"
5. Say "LEFT CLICK"

Pretty neat isn't it? You can even roll the number references together more, saying "MOUSEGRID WINDOW 1 2 7 LEFT CLICK". Try it out!

Mousegrid Drag and Drop

Okay, now that we've played with the mousegrid option a little bit, let's cut to the chase and walk through moving an icon from one position on the Desktop to another. The icon I am moving is in the middle left of the screen and I am moving it to the bottom right of the screen. Here goes:

1. Say "MINIMISE ALL WINDOWS"
2. With focus on the Desktop now, say "MOUSEGRID".
3. Say "4 1 6 1"
4. Say "MARK"
5. Say "MOUSEGRID"
6. Say "9 6"
7. Say "DRAG"
8. Say "STOP LISTENING"

So the JPG image icon that I had placed on the left hand side of my Desktop has now been dragged over to the bottom right of the Desktop.

If at any point you lose your way with the voice commands remember to use either "UNDO THAT" to go back a step or "CANCEL" to switch the mode off completely.

Drag and Drop with Dragon: Moving an Email to a Folder in Outlook

Let's go through another example to really reinforce the voice command steps. This time I am in Outlook 2007 and I am going to use the MOUSEGRID command to move an email from my Inbox list view to a folder in the Navigation Pane on the left-hand side of the program interface. With focus in my Inbox, I approach this scenario as follows:

1. Say "MOUSEGRID WINDOW".
2. Say "2"
3. Say "4"
4. Say "5"
5. Say "2"
6. Say "MARK"
7. Say "MOUSEGRID WINDOW".
8. Say "4"
9. Say "7"
10. Say "8"
11. Say "3"
12. Say "DRAG"
13. Say "GO TO SLEEP"

And that's it! Of course there are shortcuts you can take here - you might want to skip the mousegrid completely for certain Dragon mouse control options. But, while using the mousegrid is not always the fastest option, it does make for a safe and secure to move things around.

Have fun and here's to the next 50 posts!!!