"Hover" and "Tool-tip"

These complementary terms should be explained together.

• "Hovering" is the act of positioning the mouse pointer over an on-screen element, and doing nothing other than waiting (if necessary). This is also known as a "mouseover."

• The "Tool-tip" is the message that appears near the mouse pointer once it is "hovering" over an object.

For example, the instructions for Schedule Manager state that if you "hover" the mouse pointer over a bar in the "Tasks" graph, it will display the number of Tasks the bar represents. This particular kind of tool-tip displays instantly.

Other tool-tips may take half a second or so to display, such as menu items in the Navigation bar, and toolbar icons.

In some scenarios, tool-tips appear only to display the full text of a truncated item. For example, it is possible to resize the Properties panel so that its cells do not display the full text of the information within. Look at the output of the "Name" datum in the following example.

The text is truncated, and the entire name of the selected Procedure is not visible. Hovering the mouse pointer over this text, however, displays a tool-tip showing the full text.