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Gnumeric Menus

Chapter 3. Gnumeric Menus

3.1. Introduction to Menus

This section of the manual describes the use of the menubar and the menus themselves. The rest of Chapter 3 then explains each entry in every Gnumeric menu, submenu or context menu.

A menu is a graphical element within a program which appears with a list of options. For instance, almost all applications have a File menu through which the user can access the computer's filesystem to open or save their work. The main menus are on the menubar. The use of these menus is discussed in Section 3.1.1.

Gnumeric also uses context menus to give users a quick way to access certain commands. The context menu will open up right under the mouse pointer when one of the mouse buttons, usually the rightmost, is clicked. This menu is called a context menu because the entries in the menu are different depending on the location of the mouse pointer. The context menus are discussed in Section 3.10.

Both the main menus, on the menubar, and context menus may have sub-menus. Sub-menus are indicated by a small right pointing arrow. To access the sub-menus, the user must move the pointer down to the sub-menu entry and carefully across to the position of the little arrow. After an instant the sub-menu will open up and the user must carefully move the pointer directly across into the sub-menu. Occasionally, when there is not enough room to the right of the currently open menu, sub-menus may open to the left. Navigating sub-menus can be difficult since the menu will close if the mouse pointer moves into any other menu entry.

Menu entries which are followed by an ellipsis (three dots) indicate that this entry will open a dialog window which will ask the user for more choices.

3.1.2. General Menu Behavior

Gnumeric menus are opened with a simple click on the name of the menu in the menu bar. Once clicked, the menu will stay open. If the mouse pointer is dragged over the name of another menu on the menubar, the first menu will close and the new menu open up. This is a useful way to look in each menu to hunt for a commands. Menus can also be opened through the keyboard. One of the letters in each menu is underlined. Typing the Alt key at the same time as the underlined letter key will open the menu. This is also true of sub-menus. Once the menus are open, the arrow keys can be used to move between menus or select an entry in a particular menu. An open menu can be closed with a click over any other area of the application or of the desktop. The menus can also be closed by typing the escape key, Esc.