In this chapter:
They may not be flashy, but menus and dialog boxes are your key to controlling
Windows' every move...
Communicating with a computer is a tricky business. For all its speed and power,
your PC is actually the strong, silent type: it has a limited vocabulary, it doesn't
understand English, and you definitely can't talk to it. So how do you tell Windows
exactly what you want to do--no ifs, ands, or buts? Simple. You ask Windows for a
list of all the things your PC is capable of doing right now; then pick one.
These plain-English lists are called menus. After you make your selection from the list, Windows passes the instructions along to your PC in a way it's guaranteed to understand. If Windows needs more information--for example, if you ask it to save a file and it needs to know what you want to name the file--it will pop up a fill-in-the-blanks form called a dialog box to make the process a little easier.
Menus and dialog boxes are the most common ways to communicate with Windows and Windows applications. And here's the good news: They look and act the same no matter where you are in Windows. Once you master a few simple concepts, you're well on your way to telling your computer exactly what you want it to do.
A menu is simply a list of choices. You use menus all the time in your everyday life. When you drive up to the order window at McDonald's, you pick your lunch from a menu. When you withdraw cash from your ATM, you touch a menu on the screen to tell the bank's computer to hand over a few $20 bills. Menus are always tailor-made for the circumstances: You can't get a burger and fries at the bank, and there's no way Ronald McDonald will fork over forty bucks. The same is true of Windows menus: the actual choices you see will be different, depending on the kind of window with which you're working; only the choices that make sense will be on the list.
When you choose something from a Windows menu, you're telling Windows you want it to do something. Whatever you click might perform an action, or it might pop up a box asking you for more information. Or it might do nothing at all.
Menus and dialog boxes help you and Windows communicate without any misunderstandings.
Start menu:
Windows home base. Click the start button to see a list of all the things you
can do with Windows
Dialog boxes:
just fill in the blanks and go. When Windows needs detailed information from you,
it will pop up one of these handy fill-in-the-blanks forms.
Pull-down menus:
command central for Windows programs. Whenever you want to do something in a window,
these handy lists are the first place to look.
Pop-up menus:
quick shortcuts for common commands. Point to an item and right-click to get a
list of options you're most likely to need for that item.
OK, you've wandered into the Windows desktop and you're not exactly sure where to go next. When you want to know where you can go, it's time for a visit to the Start menu, which pops up when you press the Start button at the bottom-left corner of your desktop.
No other menu, anywhere else in Windows, is quite like this one. What's different? For one thing, you push a button to get to it; with other menus, you click a word or an object. For another, the Start menu extends upward from the bottom of the screen, unlike other Windows menus, which follow a more conventional top-down organization. It's more colorful, with icons for each entry instead of simple lines of text. You'll also notice that the Start menu uses cascading menus, in which one menu choice leads to a brand-new menu (follow the small black arrowheads in Figure 9.1 to pick up the trail of cascading menus).
Plain English, please!Cascading menus get their name from the same effect you'll notice if you watch a waterfall as it rushes down a cliff. Each time the stream of water hits a rock, it splashes off to the side to form a new waterfall. If you can't remember what a cascading waterfall looks like, it's time to get up from that computer and take a vacation!
Fig. 9.1
The Start menu is the first place to look when you're not sure where to go next. Cascading menus lead you automatically to other programs and other places in Windows.
You'll use the Start menu every time you fire up Windows, but you'll use the two other kinds of menus--pull-downs and pop-ups--much more often.
With cascading menus, one thing leads to another. When you rest your mouse pointer on a menu choice with one of those small black arrows, another menu pops out, usually to the right. After you see the new menu, you're free to move your mouse pointer to one of the choices on that menu, where you may find even more cascading menus.
TIP: Sometimes, menus cascade in a different direction than you expect. If Windows sees that it's run out of room on the right side, it will pop up the new cascading menu to the left. If there's no room below, the new menu may shift up on your screen.
Suppose, for example, that you want to open WordPad so you can write a short report. Here's how it's done:
TIP: Cascading menus take some getting used to. If you find that they disappear before you can make your choice, try slowing down a little. When the menu appears to the right, move the cursor slowly, in a straight line, to the new menu. Now you can move up or down as fast as you like.
Pull-down menus are everywhere in Windows. With a few rare exceptions, everything you can do in any Windows program is available underneath one of these main menu choices. (Sometimes your choices are buried under two or three cascading menus, but they're almost all in there somewhere.)
To find a pull-down menu, just look for the menu bar, right underneath a window's title bar. Think of the menu bar as a long curtain rod, with each individual menu hanging from it in a neat line. Each menu unrolls like an old-fashioned window shade to reveal the list of choices printed on it (see Fig. 9.2). Getting to a pull-down menu is easy: just point to one of the keywords on the menu bar, and click the left mouse button to unfurl it.
Generally, your choice of pull-down menus is fixed; that is, the selections on the menu bar remain the same, no matter what you're doing in the program. Double-click My Computer, for example, and you'll see the same menus--File, Edit, View, and Help--every time, without fail. Sometimes, however, the choices on a pull-down menu vary, depending on what icon you have selected or what kind of file is open.
Fig. 9.2
Everything you could possibly want to do in Windows, you can do from a pull-down menu. Use the File menu in the My Computer window, for example, to open or close a file, or even to find a file or folder when you're not sure where you put it.
Q&A: My mouse works, but I prefer the keyboard. How can I make menu choices without a mouse?
Press the Alt key and the underlined letter of a menu name to open a menu or highlight a command. Press the down arrow to move the highlight down the list of commands in a menu. Press Enter to choose the command, or Esc to close a menu and say "Never mind, I don't want any of these."
To uncover the last menu type, we'll have to go on the Windows version of a treasure hunt, because pop-up menus (sometimes called shortcut menus) are literally hidden throughout Windows. Revealing these buried treasures doesn't take a pick and a shovel, though--just a click with the right mouse button (see Fig. 9.3).
Fig. 9.3
Position the mouse pointer, click the right mouse button, and pop goes the menu. To pick a menu selection, point to your choice and click the left mouse button once.
TIP: Besides being hidden, pop-up menus are unlike pull-downs in another way: the choices available from a pop-up menu change, depending on what you're pointing to. But you'll almost always see a choice called Properties, which will give you detailed information about whatever you're pointing to.
You'll use pop-up menus for two main reasons: as shortcuts and to adjust the settings of nearly everything within Windows. The shortcut part is easy: when you click the icon for your hard drive, notice how the first three choices on the pop-up menu are the same as the first three choices on the pull-down File menu. To adjust settings for a particular piece of hardware or a specific part of Windows, you'll use the Properties menu choice to pop up a properties sheet; you'll find references to these properties sheets nearly everywhere in this book.
I use the pop-up Properties menu all the time to make sure there's enough room on my hard disk before I copy a large file there. It's a simple process:
TIP: How do you know when a pop-up menu is available? You don't. So, anytime you're not sure what to do, just point at something and click the right mouse button. Trust me: There's no way you can hurt your system just by popping up a menu, so click away.
Pop-up menus can be extremely useful, and sometimes the only way you'll find out about them is by accident. Suppose, for example, that you've been trying to find a file on your hard drive, and you've cluttered up the entire screen with stray windows. You'd like nothing more than to sweep them all out of the way in one motion. You don't know whether the taskbar has a pop-up menu, but you can find out by aiming the mouse pointer at the taskbar and clicking the right button. Yep, there's a pop-up menu, all right, and one of the choices is Minimize All Windows. Click there and voilà, your screen is clean again.
TIP: I'm constantly amazed at the things I discover when I right-click some objects. For example, if you have a CD-ROM drive like mine, you can right-click its icon, choose Ej_ect from the pop-up menu, and watch the CD slide out of the drive without any human intervention.
Anything you can do in Windows, you can do with the help of a menu. It might not always be the fastest way, but it's guaranteed to work. If you're ever stumped at how to get a particular job done with a Windows program, your best bet is to look on every menu you can find--sooner or later, the command you're looking for will turn up.
Don't forget the basic principle of Windows: First select, then act. Before you can pick something from the menu, you have to point at it.
Remember, pull-down menus work just like window shades. When you pull down the shade, it stays down. And when you click a pull-down menu, the menu stays down, too, even if you lift your finger from the mouse button. That makes it easy to move through the menu searching for the right choice. Once you've found the menu choice you're looking for, just point at it and click again.
The whole point of pull-down menus is to make Windows easier to use, so it's reassuring to know that there are a few widely accepted conventions you can count on. The first two menu choices on the left are almost always File and Edit, and the last menu on the right is usually Help (see Fig. 9.4). What's in-between is different for every program.
Fig. 9.4
Most Windows programs follow common conventions for the main menu. WordPad's main menu, for example, features the familiar File, Edit, and Help menus. Specialized menus like Format are displayed in the middle.
TIP: You can almost always close a program by choosing Exit from the bottom of the File menu. You can almost always get information about a program by choosing Help, About.
Notice how the mouse pointer is "sticky"--even when you take your finger off the mouse button, it keeps tracking through the menu choices as you move the mouse--left and right, up and down. To see all the main menus, just move the pointer along the keywords in each menu bar.
Sometimes choosing a menu item does something right away. If you choose File, Save, for example, and you've already given your file a name, a program like WordPad will simply save your most recent work using the existing file name, and return you to what you were doing.
But sometimes a menu choice does nothing at all. You can point and click until your finger falls off and nothing happens. What's going on? You've stumbled on a menu choice that's temporarily unavailable. Maybe you were working on a word processing document, and tried to use the Paste command without first cutting or copying something to the Clipboard.
Windows could simply remove the Paste choice from the Edit menu, but then you'd be left scratching your head. "I know it was there a minute ago," you'd say, as you scrambled through all the other pull-down menus to find the missing command. And you'd be right. So instead of leaving you to guess whether or not you can do something, Windows grays out the command (see Fig. 9.5 for an example), to let you know that it's still there--it's just not available for you to use right now.
Q&A: I chose a command, but nothing seemed to happen. It wasn't grayed out, but it isn't working. What's up?
Is there a check mark next to the command you think is not working? If there is, click the command again. Now is it doing what you expect?
Some commands are like on/off switches. A check mark means it's "on"; the lack of a check mark means it's "off."
Fig. 9.5
When a menu choice is temporarily unavailable or inappropriate, it doesn't disappear from the menu. Instead, Windows "grays out" that choice so you'll know it isn't working right now.
When you want to roll a window shade back up again, you've got to give it a snap. A Windows menu works in much the same way. If you decide you don't want to choose anything from the menu, just give a quick click anywhere in the window except on the menu itself to make the menu roll up again.
Sometimes, a simple menu choice isn't enough to get what you want. If you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe in the rue de Dialog and you use your high-school French to order le Big Mac, your waiter will know that you want a burger, but he won't know how you want it. Medium rare or burnt? Do you want lettuce and tomatoes? How about catsup? And would monsieur or madame care for some pommes des frites on the side? Sigh .... Wouldn't it be convenient if you could just point to all your choices at once?
Well, that's precisely what Windows lets you do. Instead of bombarding you with one question after another, Windows puts together a simple fill-in-the-blanks form and hands it to you. You check a box here, pick an item off a list there, fill in the empty spaces, and hand it back by clicking the OK button. These interactive forms are called dialog boxes, and you'll use them constantly when you work in Windows.
Windows is constantly asking you for more information. When you print a document, for example, you'll have to answer a few questions: Where's the printer? How many copies do you want? Do you want to skip any pages? What kind of paper? And so on.
Fortunately, you'll find the same kind of gizmos and widgets in all of Windows' dialog boxes.
For example, let's say you've just created a file using WordPad, Windows' built-in word processor, and now you want to save it. You get the ball rolling by doing the following:
Fig. 9.6
To save a file in WordPad, you use a dialog box to tell Windows exactly where and how you want it to store your work.
The conversation can be as short and sweet as that, or you can get more elaborate: Which file format would you like to use? Which folder do you want to store the new document in? Windows will take its best guess, but you'll need to make the final decisions.
Dialog boxes look like program windows, but they behave a little differently. Generally, you can't change the size of a dialog box, although you can move it around on the screen. And they're as persistent as a door-to-door salesman--in most cases, when a dialog box pops up on your screen, you've got to deal with it before you can do anything else.
TIP: Sometimes, a dialog box gets in the way of the very thing you need to see to answer one of its questions. Although you can't resize dialog boxes, you can move them around the screen and out of the way. Put the mouse pointer on the title bar, click and hold down the left button, and drag the box to another location. That way, you can deal with those persistent questions without losing sight of your work.
Dialog boxes come in all shapes and sizes. Fortunately, they're made out of interchangeable parts, so once you learn to recognize the pieces, you'll know how to deal with any dialog box.
When you see a dialog box, odds are it popped up for one of three reasons:
When you're faced with a new dialog box, don't panic--it may look different, but it works just like every other dialog box in Windows. Table 9.1 is your secret decoder ring.
| What's it called? |
What does it look like? |
What do you do with it? |
| Button. When you're done with a dialog box, your main choice will be the OK button. Other popular buttons include Cancel ("Oops! I didn't mean to open this dialog box!"), Help, and Close. If you see an ellipsis (...) following the label on a button, you can expect to see another dialog box when you press that button. |
|
Press the OK button to send your input on to Windows. Press the Cancel button to back out without doing anything Press Help if you're not sure what to do next. |
| Input box. When Windows wants you to type something and doesn't have a suggestion, it shows you an empty box. |
|
Click inside the box to start typing. |
| Drop-down list. Sometimes, Windows knows what you want to do, but wants to make sure you can choose another option if you wish. In file boxes, for example, Windows assumes you'll want to use drive C:, but lets you pick a floppy drive or CD-ROM if you prefer. A drop-down list looks a lot like an input box, except that it offers you multiple choices. |
|
Type in your choice (even if it's not on the list). Click the arrow just to the right of the box to view the other choices on the list. |
| Scrolling list. When Windows is pretty certain that you'll want to pick one item from a long list, it uses a scrolling list. The scroll bars look and act just like the ones you'll find elsewhere in Windows. |
|
Pick an entry from the list. Windows won't let you typr in anything that isn't already on the list. |
| Check box. These tiny boxes come in handy when you need to make a simple yes-no decision. Sometimes a section of a dialog box will contain a number of check boxes arranged together. |
|
Click the box to add a check mark; click again to remove the check mark |
| Radio button. Sorry, you can't get news, sports, or weather on your PC. But if you think of the buttons on an old-fashioned car radio, you'll understand how this control works--and how it got its name. Since you can't listen to more than one station at a time, when you push one button, the one that had been depressedpops out. (The one that's currently "pushed" has a black mark inside the circle.) |
|
When you see a dialod box that contains two or more choices with a circular button in front of each entry, you have to choose one and only one of the options |
| Spinner. Spinners work like the numbers on a safe--the number in the box goes up and down when you click the matching arrow. |
|
Click the up or down arrow to make the value in the box higher or lower, repectively. |
| Slider. Have you ever stood on a doctor's scale? Then you know how this control works. You drag the indicator to change the value. |
|
Slide the indicator to the right or left to make the value bigger or smaller. |
If you've ever filled out a census form or taken part in an opinion poll, you'll feel right at home with dialog boxes. It's not a test; it's simply a convenient way for Windows to gather a lot of information in a very small space.
Most of the choices you'll make in a dialog box are simple and straightforward. Check boxes, for example, are easy--a check means yes, and a blank box means no. Radio buttons and drop-down lists are equally easy, as long as you're careful to click in the right place.
Scrolling lists can be trickier to work with, especially when they're used to keep track of files and folders. To see an example of how to move through a scrolling list, right-click any blank space on the Windows desktop and choose Properties. Click the index tab labeled Background (you'll find it at the top of the box). You'll see the dialog box shown in Figure 9.7. Now look at the matched pair of scrolling lists: one for patterns, the other for wallpaper. Use the up and down arrows to move through the lists. When you see an entry you like, click it.
Fig. 9.7
Scroll through the list to select the background you want on your Windows desktop. You can use the arrow keys, the mouse, or the keyboard to move from one entry to the next.
TIP: This one's a real time-saver: When a drop-down list or a scrolling list contains lots of files, a simple shortcut lets you jump quickly through the list. Just press the first letter of the item you're looking for. For instance, if you're looking for a file named Sales Report, just press S to skip straight to the first entry that begins with that letter. In a long list, you can type the first few letters very quickly. In a folder window, for example, if you want to jump to the Sales Report file, you can type the letters SAL in quick succession; Windows will take you there.
It's easiest to work with the mouse, of course, but a few keys serve crucial functions when it comes to getting around in dialog boxes--especially crowded ones. The Tab key, for example, moves you from one section to the next, and the cursor keys (the up and down arrows) move between different options within each section. To set a check mark without using the mouse, just hit the spacebar.
TIP: If a dialog box still has you stumped and leaves you speechless, remember that you can press F1 (or the Help button, if there is one) for help written just for that dialog box. Help will pop up in its own box on-screen to explain what's in the dialog box and what you're supposed to do.
Plain English, please!When you get help that's specifically designed for the task or box you're working with right now, it's called context-sensitive help. Pressing F1 will often get you context-sensitive help, no matter what you're working on.
Q&A: Hey--this dialog box won't let me do anything! What's up?
It must be either inappropriate or impossible for Windows to do what's in that section of the dialog box. When that happens, you'll usually see that section grayed out.
When you click OK, you're sending your message to Windows, and it's going to do exactly what you asked it to do. If you decide that's not what you want, don't click OK--instead, back out gracefully by clicking the Cancel button that appears in many dialog boxes. If there's no Cancel button, you still may be able to back out by pressing the Esc key. If you click OK and don't like the results, you can sometimes reverse what you've done by choosing Undo.
Q&A: My mouse isn't working. How do I get around in a dialog box without it?
When you press the Tab key, you move forward to the next option in the tabbing order of a dialog box. As you move, the option that is currently chosen has a dotted line around it, or is highlighted. (Sometimes the highlight can be hard to see. If you're not sure which option is highlighted, press the Tab key repeatedly until you're sure where it's ended up.)
Press Shift+Tab to return to the previous option in the tabbing order. Press Enter to carry out the options you have chosen.
If one of the letters in a button or a label is underlined, you can use that letter to move directly to an option. Press Alt and the underlined letter at the same time. For example, to move to the File Name option in the above example, press Alt+N.
Most dialog boxes look and act very similar, but some are absolutely identical. When you tell any Windows program to open or save a document, you'll see one of these common dialog boxes.
With virtually all Windows programs, the dialog boxes you see when you choose File Open, File Save, and File Save As are exactly alike. In fact, these dialog boxes are just another variation of the Windows Explorer, which we'll cover in more detail in Chapter 10.
© Copyright, Que Corporation. All rights reserved.