I recently was contacted by someone I had worked with a number of times over the years at user conferences. He hadn’t been actively using CorelDRAW for a while so was still using CorelDRAW X3.

Since he had a need for it again, he had just upgraded to CorelDRAW X7. When trying to do some customization on the toolbars, he hadn’t had any luck at all. Nothing seemed to work and so I was contacted.

I rarely use CorelDRAW X7 myself so I don’t think I had even attempted to customize a toolbar. My only guess was that the toolbar may be locked and simply unlocking it would resolve the problem. The answer came back that unlocking the toolbars didn’t solve the problem.

So my long lost friend headed out to walk his dog and he had one of those moments where a lightbulb turns on over your head. He is left-handed and uses the Mouse Properties Control Panel setting shown above right to switch the mouse buttons. To this day, I think he is the only person I’ve met who has told me they make this switch. I’m sure there are others who simply haven’t told me. Back in the days of working conferences, this drove everyone else crazy since his mouse was “messed up”.

I don’t use a mouse myself as I believe everyone should be using a Wacom tablet! Since I don’t use a mouse and I’m not left-handed, I don’t change the settings in Control Panel.

Now that you’ve read this story, I hope you’ll understand that sometimes the solutions to a “CorelDRAW problem” can be buried deep in something else on your computer. And for you lefties, you may want to consider keeping the mouse buttons as is so that you don’t unknowingly cause weird problems elsewhere.