Tip 13: Waiter, a Menu please!

A common element to most application windows is the Menu Bar. Located below the Title Bar, the Menu Bar is the wide strip that contains File, Edit, View, Tools, Help and other options. I’m sure you’ve used Menus plenty by now and you already understand how to navigate through them with your mouse.

Before we get going too far into this tip, I should point out that if you are using Internet Explorer and you do not see the Menu Bar, press either the Alt key or F10 to force the menu to show itself. The menu can be hidden in Internet Explorer and other programs. I’ll show you how to change this behavior in IE and other programs later in this tip.

Time to take some shortcuts

You have probably noticed that menus don’t always look the same. Sometimes one letter in each word is underlined and sometimes none are. What the heck’s going on here? And what does that underline mean?

First I’ll answer the latter question: the underline is the “keyboard shortcut” for that menu. That underlined letter corresponds to the menu command that will be issued if you press that key on the keyboard. Take a look shortcut cues in this image:

I invoked this menu by pressing Alt + F (underlined in “File”) and releasing the Alt key. In this menu, I can now trigger any of the menu commands by typing the underlined letter. Typing “N” would close my current document and open a new one. Typing “O” instead would open a dialog box asking which file you want to open.

Something that is often overlooked on menu items is the “trailing ellipsis” (“…”) after some menu items. The trailing ellipsis is a visual trigger telling you that this menu item will open a dialog window. Menu items with no trailing ellipsis simply execute an operation without any need for interaction (unless it needs to prompt you to save your file or another important warning).

Menu navigation is easy from here. In addition to using the shortcut letters and numbers, you can use the arrow keys to move to the right and left on the main menu bar, up and down on the dropdown menus, and to the right on a menu with a  black triangle on the right side. This triangle means that there is a sub-menu that can be opened by typing its shortcut key, pressing the right arrow or pressing the Enter key. That sub-menu is similarly navigable with the arrows, and pressing the left arrow closes the sub-menu leaving you on the parent item with the black triangle.

Once you’ve navigated to the menu item of your choice, hit Enter and it’s a done deal. Not liking where this is going and you want to bail on the menu entirely? Hit the Escape key to close the entire menu.

I find this arrow-key navigation for menus particularly useful when I’m looking for a command, but I can’t remember where it’s located. In larger, more specialized applications, it’s a nice way to explore the options without worrying about accidentally letting go of the mouse or having to drag it around the desk.

Safely handling shortcut key collisions

As you see in the previous screen shot, sometimes menu items get long and complex. It does happen occasionally where two menu items have the same shortcut letter assigned. What happens here? If you type that letter key, the selection rectangle will jump to the first menu item with that letter and wait for your next decision. If you press the letter again, it will jump to the next one with that letter and wait again. If you hit the Enter key, the currently selected menu command is executed.

Some menus have no shortcut key underlines. In Internet Explorer, if you select Menu option “Favorites” you’ll note that none of these Menu options have shortcut keys defined. As we did with shortcut key collisions, you can type the first letter of the entry you want to move the selector to the first menu item that begins with that letter. Press the same key again to go to the next one that begins with that letter. Wash, rinse, repeat. Hit the Enter key when you’ve got the one you want selected.

Mutant Menu items

Some menu items are different from others. Some have a checkbox in front of them. Take a look at the next screen shot and observe the results of selecting Menu option “View | Toolbars” (that’s Windows lingo for click on the View menu item and then on the Toolbars item).

The check mark in front of “Favorites Bar” means that the Favorites Bar is currently visible. Similarly the lack of a check mark in front of the “Menu Bar” option means if you select that Menu item, the Menu Bar will be displayed by default. The next time you select “View | Toolbars” you’ll see a checkbox in front of “Menu Bar”—as expected.

Whether you have the Menu Bar visible in Internet Explorer is completely up to you as the user. I’ve become accustomed to the button menus in Internet Explorer, so I leave this option unchecked. Add salt to your own taste.

Playing hide and seek with shortcuts

To answer the question of where do the shortcut underlines go when they’re not in use and why do they hide in the first place, trust me…there’s a secret undisclosed location where we programmers store all of the unused underlines, so they are secured when not onscreen.

But why do they hide in the first place? We have to set the way-back machine to the earliest versions of Windows, when menu options were always visible. Somewhere back around Windows NT/Windows 2000, Microsoft designers decided to tweak the behavior of the menus to make those underlines only appear when they are needed. It left us with less “noise” on the menu, especially when using the mouse to navigate the menus, since the letter shortcut was not needed.

Microsoft gets a lot of feedback from their users on how features are utilized, and this change was a part of streamlining the user experience. When you invoke a menu with the keyboard using either the Alt key or F10, the shortcut underlines are displayed. When you invoke the menu with your mouse, they are hidden. Of course, this can be reconfigured to show the shortcut underlines all the time if you’d like. If so, feel free to ask in the comments section below.

It’s good to know that the keyboard shortcuts still work whether they are displayed or not. You can use the mouse to open the File menu and then press “X” to close the program if you prefer. Or you can use the system command Alt + F4 to close the window. So many choices. So many ways of doing the same thing. Redundancy is alive and well in Windows.

Next time we’ll talk a little on the topic of SCREAMING CAPITALS and how to avoid this embarrassing netiquette faux pas. See you then…