Right-click on a Wacom Bamboo Pen in Win7

My Wacom Graphire tablet finally bit the dust after ten or so years of faithful service. (Rest in peace!) So I went out and bought a new Bamboo Pen to replace it. A tablet is essential for effective OneNote use as well as sketching and Photoshop work.

Visually it looks better with its flat and shiny blacks compared to the gray and blue of the Graphire. The cheapest Bamboo Pen model unfortunately lost the eraser feature on the back end of the pen. I hardly ever used that feature anyway, but still it feels like a reduction in value as the price for both were about the same (even after 10 years).

However the aspect ratio of the Bamboo matches that of my widescreen display, so I no longer have the unmapped area at the bottom of the tablet.

For my workflow, I require both the middle-click and right-click mouse buttons mapped to the two pen buttons. However, try as I could, I couldn’t get the right-click mapping to stick.

The solution lies in that there are two sets of settings in the Control Panel for Pen and Touch – the Wacom driver settings in “Control Panel > Pen Tablet Properties,” and the Win7 settings in “Control Panel > Pen and Touch.”

Be sure to check the “Use the pen button as a right-click equivalent” option in the “Pen and Touch” panel in addition to correctly mapping the buttons in “Pen Tablet Properties.”