Buttons and pointers in Windows XP

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Pointers on pointers

When you move the mouse around on your desk, the pointer on the screen moves around in concert. Click one of the mouse buttons while the pointer is sitting on something and it may (or may not) react. If Windows shows you one of its “busy” pointers, you go out to have a latte, and lunch, and run through a quick 18 holes, and come back only to discover that the busy pointer is still there, chances are pretty good that Windows is hung. (That’s a technical term, okay? Don’t laugh. You can also say that Windows went belly up or that it crashed or froze or died or bit the big one.) If Windows hangs, hold down the Ctrl key and, without letting go of it, press the Alt key and, without letting go of the preceding two, press the Del key. (That’s called a three-finger salute or a Vulcan Mind Meld or, uh, several entirely unprintable things.)

The Windows Task Manager appears, and you can (usually) use it to close down whatever is ailing Windows. If you encounter one of the resizing pointers while working with a picture, remember that different programs use the resizing pointers differently: Some may cut off (“crop”) parts of a picture as you resize it, while others may stretch or shrink the picture as you drag the mouse. Usually you can use some combination of the Shift and Ctrl keys to convince the program to behave itself: Hold down the Ctrl key while resizing, for example, and the program may start stretching the picture instead of cropping it. Experiment. If all else fails, you can always start over again. The point where typed text gets inserted onto the screen is called the insertion point (more rocket science). Various word processors show the insertion point differently, but Word uses a solid vertical line.

Don’t be too surprised if some old cuss yours truly included calls the insertion point a “cursor.” That’s a throwback to the Cro-Magnon days when word processors worked more like typewriters, and the blinking cursor kept track of where text would go. Using the right button Windows XP allows you to right-click just about anywhere and choose from a list of actions to be performed on the item you’ve clicked. For example, you can right-click on a disk drive and choose to search the disk drive; you can right-click on a printer and make the printer stop printing. The choices that appear when you right-click on an item are called a shortcut menu (sometimes also called a right-click menu or a context menu). Mice need to be cleaned! If you start having problems with a sluggish mouse one that jumps, stalls, or doesn’t move around the screen the way it should you should immediately turn the beast upside down and clean it. If you see a rubber ball, pop the lid off, take out the ball, blow on it, and clean off the roller contacts inside (you may need a cotton swab and some isopropyl alcohol). Regardless of whether the mouse has a ball, the feet need to be cleaned from time to time use your fingernail and scrape gently. Windows Most of the time that you spend working with Windows is spent working with, uh, windows.

The kind with the little “w” the rectangles that appear all over your screen. Each part of a window has a name and a specific function. Many people spend most of their time on the computer working in Word 2003, which is the word processor in Office 2003 and the word processor used by Outlook 2003 for composing e-mail messages. You may have a copy of it on your machine. A few details worth noting:  

-  The window title appears both in the title bar that is, the bar across the top of the window and (usually) in the Windows taskbar, way down at the bottom of the screen. That makes it easy for you to identify which window is which and to switch among them by clicking on the taskbar.

 -  Clicking the Minimize button makes the window disappear but leaves the title down in the Windows taskbar, so you can bring the window back with just a click.  

-  Clicking the Restore button “restores” the size of the window. That is, if the window doesn’t take up the whole screen and you click the restore button, it expands to take up the full screen. On the other hand, if the window is taking up the whole screen and you click on the restore button, it reduces in size to occupy a portion of the screen. I have no idea why that’s called restoring.  

-  Clicking the Cancel button removes the screen entirely even from the Windows taskbar most commonly by shutting down the program that’s using the window. Many windows can be resized by clicking and dragging an edge or a corner. See the preceding section on “Mousing” for details. Dialog Boxes When the computer interacts with you that is, when it has a question to ask, or when it needs more information in order to complete a task it usually puts a dialog box on the screen. A dialog box is nothing more or less than a small window that requires your attention. Each of the parts of a window has a name:

 -  Title: A dialog box’s title appears at the top of the dialog box, but the title rarely appears in the Windows taskbar. This is one of the ways that a dialog box is different from a garden-variety window (see the preceding section): You can usually hop directly to a regular ol’ window by clicking in the taskbar. To find a lost dialog box, you frequently have to hunt around. Those “things” that appear on dialog boxes are called controls. (Sounds a whole lot better than “things,” true?) Windows comes with many controls, and most of the controls you see from day to day are drawn from the standard control toolbox. Standard controls are a real boon to us Dummies because they work the same way, all the time, no matter where you are in Windows.

 -  Cancel button: The Cancel button almost always appears on a dialog box, but the other two buttons that you often see on a regular window Restore and Minimize rarely show up on dialog boxes. Clicking the Cancel button almost always makes the dialog box go away.

 -  Tabs: Those funny-looking index tabs (usually just called tabs) are supposed to remind you of filing tabs. Click on a tab, and you bring up a whole bunch of settings, which are usually related at least, some programmer somewhere thought they were related. You can usually hop from one part of a dialog box to the next by pressing the Tab key. Press Shift+Tab to move backwards. If you see an underlined letter in a dialog box called an accelerator key hold down the Alt key and press the letter, and you go directly to that location. In some dialog boxes, pressing Enter is the same as clicking OK (unless you’ve used the Tab key to move around). In other dialog boxes, though, pressing Enter doesn’t do anything.  

-  Spinners: These are almost always placed right next to numbers, with the number hooked up so that it increases when you click the up arrow and decreases when you click the down arrow. Sometimes you can bypass the spinner entirely, select the number, delete it, and type whatever you want.  

-  Drop-down lists: These lists come in two different flavors. With one kind, you’re limited to the choices that appear in the drop-down list: If the item you want is in the list, you just pick it; if the item isn’t there, you’re up the ol’ creek without a paddle. The other kind of drop-down list lets you type in whatever you want if your choice doesn’t appear in the list. Programmers hate that kind of drop-down list because it lets you do things like order anchovies and pepper sauce on your bagels.

 -  Check boxes: Check boxes let you say “yes” or “no,” independently, to a whole bunch of choices; if you see a bunch of check boxes, you can pick one or none or all of ’em. Option buttons, on the other hand, only let you choose one out of a group no more, no less.

 -  Command buttons: These buttons tell the dialog box to get on with it. Click a command button, and the dialog box does something. Files and Folders “What’s a file?” Man, I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked that question. A file is a, uh, thing. Yeah, that’s it. A thing. A thing that has stuff inside of it. Why don’t you ask me an easier question, like “what is a paragraph?” or “what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?” A file is a fundamental chunk of stuff. Like most fundamental chunks of stuff (say, protons, or Congressional districts, or ear wax), any attempt at a definitive definition gets in the way of understanding the thing itself. Suffice it to say that a Word document is a file. An Excel workbook is a file. That photograph your cousin e-mailed you the other day is a file. Every track on Nine Inch Nails’ latest CD is a file, but so is every track on every audio CD ever made. Trent Reznor isn’t that special. File and folder names can be very long, but they can’t contain the following characters: / \ : * ? “ < > |.

Files can be huge. They can be tiny. They can even be empty, but don’t short-circuit any gray cells on that observation. Three things I know for sure about files:  -  Every file has a name.  

-  Files at least, files that aren’t empty contain bits, the 1s and 0s that computers use to represent reality (a tenuous concept under the best of circumstances).  

-  Windows lets you work with files move them, copy them, create them, delete them, and group them together. Folders hold files and other folders. Folders can be empty. A single folder can hold millions yes, quite literally millions of files and other folders. Three things I know for sure about folders:  

-  Every folder has a name.  

-  Windows creates and keeps track of a whole bunch of folders, like

• A My Documents folder for each user on the PC. That’s where Windows and Microsoft Office usually put new documents that you create.

• My Pictures and My Music folders, inside each user’s My Documents folders. Windows including the Media Player tend to store your pictures and music files in these folders.

• A Shared Documents folder, which includes Shared Pictures and Shared Music folders, to make it easy to share documents, pictures, and music with other people who use your PC or other people on a network, if you have one.  -  Windows lets you move, copy, create, delete, and put folders inside of other folders. If you set them up right, folders can help you keep track of things. If you toss your files around higgledy-piggledy, no system of folders in the world will help. To look at the files and folders on your machine that you’re most likely to bump into, choose Start -> My Documents.

The picture of My Documents comes from a part of Windows called Windows Explorer, which can help keep your files and folders organized. Many of the things that you can do in Windows Explorer, you can also do elsewhere. For example, you can rename files in the File -> Open dialog box in Word but it’s hard to beat the way Windows Explorer enables you to perform powerful actions quickly and easily.