How do I make pop-up tooltip balloons stay up longer so I can read them?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #80, I take a look at those fast pop-up balloons that sometimes
disappear before you can read them. Fortunately, it may not matter.

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Pop-up tooltip balloons

Unfortunately I’m not really aware of a way to change the timing. The problem is that the timing is actually set in some cases, by Windows, but in many other cases by the actual application itself.

So you’d have to run around first, and understand, which applications are throwing up those pop-up balloons – and then go to each of those applications and see if they have a way to adjust the timing. In general, they don’t.

Mouse over the balloon

The one thing I would suggest (and the scenario that I find myself in when things go away too quickly) is that most of those balloons will stay if you immediately move the mouse cursor over them.

In other words as soon as you see a pop-up balloon appear, take the mouse and move it so that the mouse pointer is hovering over that balloon. Don’t click because clicking may take some kind of an action. It should be enough to have the mouse pointer hovering over the balloon.

That should, in most cases, keep that tooltip balloon up long enough (as long as you keep the mouse pointer over it) for you to read it.

That’s about the only real solution I have to this particular problem.

Print screen

If this is really a serious issue that you’re finding happens a lot – and turns out to have any kind of important ramification – then the other thing to do would be to quickly press the print screen key, which will take a screen shot of your entire screen.

You can then paste that into a Paint program, or a Word document, and review the contents of your screen at your leisure.

I have an article on how to make a screen shot that I refer you to there.

Don’t stress!

The good news is that, for the most part, a well-developed application, a well-designed application, is going to use those kind of self-disappearing tool tip balloons for information that is not necessarily important.

In other words, they may pop-up while you’re not even at the computer and that needs to be ok.

So the application designers, who are using these tool tips, are doing so in a way where it should be okay if you ignore them completely. It’s certainly nothing that I would get stressed about – and certainly nothing that should have an adverse impact on your overall experience.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)