Main Menu Display
We have just seen that, when you know where a menu is available, to access it, you can just click or right-click the item that holds the menu. How a menu appears can be influenced by the available room. The operating system decides on the availability of room to display the menu. If a menu is accessed from the middle to top section of a window, the operating system would display it under the item that was clicked. If the menu is being accessed from the bottom section of the screen, the operating system would calculate the available room under the item that was clicked. If there is enough room, the menu would be displayed under the item that was clicked. If there is not enough room, then the operating system would decide to display the menu above the item that was clicked
Categories of Menus
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.
a) 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 and the familiarity with it. Example is the Refresh menu on most browsers.
b) Disabled Menu Items: If a menu appears gray, this means that the menu is not available at this time. Such a menu is said to be 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.
c) 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. Example is the Save As option of the file menu in several windows.
d) 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.
e) 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.
f) 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.
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