Learn Any Computer Program in 5 Easy Steps -- Step 3 pt 3

Wow. I've covered a lot in the last few days. I'm sorry for the length of the posts, but only one or two more of them will come close to the size of the one I posted yesterday. I hope that the information should be familiar if you've used even a few programs. And that is the beauty of what I am trying to convey. Once you know how they are set up, most programs really are the same with only varying functionality.

By now, you should have a good grasp of the core of the menu. We've seen the main options for the FILE, EDIT, and VIEW menu options. These are the common options at the start of every menu. Now, let's look at the last three menus common to most programs.

Navigating the Menu -- Part 3

Today, we will look at the last three menu options common to most programs. They are the Tools, the Windows, and the Help menu options.

Tools Menu Options

The TOOLS menu option is a common menu option. Most of the choices in this screen are often tools that perform certain tasks. There are only a few choices here that will be common to most programs. Most programs that deal with editing text of some kind might have a SPELLCHECK option and possibly a WORD COUNT option. The only other one that you will find consistently in this area is the OPTIONS or PREFERENCES option.

SPELLCHECK does just what it sounds like. It activates a function that will check your document for spelling errors. Once that task is performed, it may give you some document statistics. This button will force the program to check the entire document for spelling errors.

Most of the time, I see the word count for the document as a part of the document statistics that are displayed with the spell check. Other times, such is the case with our test case, OpenOffice.org, the word count can be found as an option here in the tools menu.

Of all the choices in this menu, the one I see here almost every time is the one that says either OPTIONS or PREFERENCES. As I mentioned yesterday, sometimes the PREFERENCES menu option can be found in the EDIT menu, but it is most often found here in the TOOLS menu.

Anytime I am looking through a new program, I always make sure to check out this option. The reason why is that the dialog box that pops up, more than any other, can change the way the program behaves. If you haven't done so before, check out the PREFERENCES or OPTION menu choice of the program you are running right now. If you are looking at the one for a web browser, you will find all sorts of things that will affect how the browser operates.

If I plan to use a tutorial to get more information on a particular program, I usually leave the settings alone to start out with, but as I get more familiar with a program, I find making changes to this menu option can make it easier for me to use the program. What choices you will find here depend greatly on the purpose of the program. So much so that I cannot tell you of any one thing specific to all programs but one. In nearly every case, you have the ability to set "default" font, font size, and foreground/background colors. Other than that, the choices here are as varied as the programs themselves.

Although you will find many helpful options in the TOOLS menu, remember, only a few are common to most programs, and even these can lead to widely different choices.

Windows Menu Option

Of all the common menu choices, this is the one seen least, though you will see it on almost all menus of Microsoft programs. That doesn't mean you won't find it on other programs, just that it is not seen as much. The purpose of this particular menu choice is to control the way the current Window appears. In program terms, a WINDOW is the box that contains the visual elements of a program. Some programs allow you to have multiple document windows, where each window within the program window contains a different document. These are the programs you will most often find this windows menu.

What you will find in the WINDOWS menu are tools to ARRANGE the windows. Sometimes these arrangements are shown as menu options. TILE will display document windows either across the window VERTICALLY or down the page HORIZONTALLY. You may see an option to CASCADE the windows, or put one on top of another, slightly offset so you can see the one behind it. You can MINIMIZE or COLLAPSE the window so that one is not visible. You can RESTORE a window, so you can see it. Or you can MAXIMIZE a document window so that it takes up the whole program window. Notice that most of these options are the same things you can do with program windows.

One other thing you will likely see here is a list of open documents. This list allows the user to switch back and forth between documents that may otherwise be "hidden" or not seen.

Help Menu Option

The last menu on every program is the HELP menu option. This is the menu where you can access the resources to learning how to use the program. The program's Help Contents is usually the first option, sometimes followed by INDEX. Some programs have a SEARCH HELP option. Many will have a WHAT'S THIS? option. A few may even have a SUPPORT option. Other than the CONTENTS, the other one that you will always see is the ABOUT option.

CONTENTS is nearly always the first option of the HELP menu. If you don't see something that says CONTENTS, you probably see something that says HELP with the name of the program. In either case, this will take you to the contents of the help file.

If you see this option, the INDEX will take you to a way to find a topic based on the subject you wish to find.

The SEARCH HELP will search all of the help files for the term you are trying to find.

When you see a WHAT'S THIS menu option, this option will let you find out what a particular button or function is and how to use it.

SUPPORT will take you to a page of how to contact the makers of the program if you cannot find the answer to your situation in the help files.

The ABOUT screen will always pop up a box or splash screen that tells you the current version of the program you are running. It will usually include some sort of a build number. A copywrite notice will be found here as well. Sometimes, you might even find some information of the key programmers who wrote the program. If you ever need to know what version of a program you are running, this is the place to look.

I was very brief about much of the help items because looking through the help files can be such an important part of getting a quick start with a program that STEP 4 is dedicated to going through the help files, so we will look closely at each of the different help choices in that step.

Now we have seen all of the menu choices, there is one more area to look at before we move on, and that is the toolbars. I am including them in our discussion of the menus because most of the functions in the toolbars have a counterpart in the menus and some toolbars are so common, it can be helpful to know what to look for. So tomorrow, we'll look at the toolbars and see what we can learn from them.