Menus Categories

To diversify the actions that can be performed on a computer, there are six main categories of menus, each of which depends on the person who created the menu:

Stand-Alone Items: The simplest menu item displays a word or a group of words on its line. To use this menu type, you can simply click it. What happens depends on the program. Sometimes, it would appear as if nothing happened, in which case something could have happened behind the scenes. Sometimes nothing at all would happen. Being familiar with the program can give you more informatio

Disabled Menu Items: If a menu appears gray, this means that the menu is not available at this time. Such a menu is referred to as disabled. Clicking a disabled menu would not do anything, at all. most of the time, such a menu would require a prerequisite action in order to become available or enabled.

Ellipsis Menus: A menu with three periods indicates that an intermediary action is required. To use such a menu, click it. Once clicked, sometimes another window would be displayed.

Check Menus: A menu that appears with a check mark is used as a "witness" of a window object being available or not. This means that, when the check mark is set, the object the menu item refers to is visible. If you click such a menu item, the check mark disappears along with the item it refers to; the menu

item is still visible: only its check mark and the item it refers to disappear

Radio Menus: Some menu items appear in a group of two or more (usually not more than 7). The group is delimited by a horizontal line above the top menu item and another horizontal line below the bottom object.At any time, one of the menu items has a big round dot on its left side. This dot is called a radio button. The item that is currently active has the radio button and the other menu items don't. If you click an item other than the one with the radio button, the dot moves to the item you clicked and the previous item looses the radio button.This type of menu is used when the programmer wants only one item of the group to indicate which item of a category is active

Arrow Menus: When a menu appears with an arrow, this means that the menu item holds its own list, called a submenu. Again, this design depends on the person who created the menu and is not subject to any preconceived rule. To access the menu item, simply position the mouse cursor on the menu item that has the arrow. How the submenu appears may depend on the section of the screen from where the menu is being accessed. The operating system decides how to display this submenu based on the available room.

If the menu with arrow is accessed from the upper-left section of a window, the submenu would display on the right side of the menu and under the arrow:

If the menu is accessed from the upper-right section of the window, the operating system would check if there is enough room to display the submenu to the right and under the arrow. If there is enough room, the menu would be displayed as above. If there not enough room, then the submenu would be display on the left side of the menu and under the arrow.

If the menu is accessed from the lower-left section of the window, the operating system would check if there is enough room on the right side of the menu and under the menu with arrow. If there is enough room, the submenu would display under the arrow.
If there is not enough room under the menu, the submenu would be displayed on the right side of the menu but above the arrow.

If the menu is being accessed from the lower-right section of the screen, if there is enough room on the right side of the menu, the submenu would be displayed on the right side of the menu but above the arrow.
If there is not enough room on the right side of the arrow, the submenu would be displayed on the left side of the menu but above the arrow.