 While every program interface is different, you'll find that there's a set of commonly reoccurring elements that show up in all sorts of programs. Program designers call these common elements widgets. For example, the simplest and probably most common kind of widget is simply a button. A button is simply something the user is meant to click to perform some action, and the textual label on the button or some icon on the button is meant to indicate what that action will be. So here for example, the button labeled close, self-evidently will close this dialog window, but what this button labeled manage does is less obvious. You generally have to look at context, like here you can see it has something to do with default search, whatever that means in this particular program. Another very common widget is a text box, which is simply a place you can click to start typing and editing text. This text box here already has the text HTTP colon slash slash www.google.com slash, but you can click and type in this text box to change that. A drop-down list often looks like a button, but on the right side you'll see a small triangle pointing downwards, and that indicates that this is a drop-down list, so if you click on it, you'll get this pop-up list in which you can click to select some other item. A checkbox is simply a small little box which you click to toggle the check on and off. In this example the checkbox is currently toggled on, and the text next to the checkbox indicates what this checkbox does. These little circular buttons aren't checkboxes, they're called radio buttons. The idea with radio buttons is that you have a group of them and only one thing in the group can be selected. So here we're given three choices, open the home page, reopen the pages that were opened last, or open the following pages, and currently we have selected the top selection, open the home page. At the top of this window we have a group of tabs, one labeled basics, one labeled personal stuff, and one labeled under the hood. The idea behind tabs is that the program needs to display more stuff than will fit in the window, so it puts all this stuff onto different tabs, and at any moment in time you're only looking at one tab. You can see here that the basics tab is currently highlighted, it's a different color because that's the tab we are currently looking at. But if I now click on under the hood, the content displayed in this area changes. And here now we see another kind of widget, a scroll bar, which is also a widget for coping with the problem that we have more stuff to display than will fit in our window. Every scroll bar has an associated display area called a scroll pane, and right now the scroll bar is indicating that we're not seeing the entirety of this scroll pane, we're currently looking only at the top, but we can click and drag the scroll bar up and down to see the rest of the scroll pane. Finally, the last kind of widget I'll mention is what's called a menu bar. In most program windows you'll find a menu bar directly beneath the title bar. So far we've only talked about using the left mouse button, but what about the other mouse buttons? Well, first off the middle mouse button, there's not much we can say about it, because it just really isn't used in most programs. The right mouse button, however, is commonly used to open what's called a context menu. The idea is that you right click on something, and then a menu pops up with options pertaining to that thing that you right clicked. So here, for example, if I right click on these various icons, a menu appears with things I can click to affect that icon. And you'll find that many different things can be right clicked to get a context menu, like say you can right click here on the start menu or on the task bar here and so forth. A common mistake inexperienced users make is that they don't think to right click on things. In many programs you'll have features which are best accessed through the context menu, or in some cases which can only be accessed through a context menu. So when in doubt, try right clicking on things. Now, as for the scroll wheel on a mouse, it's really just a shortcut for moving the scroll bar up and down. So rather than mousing over and clicking on the scroll bar and dragging up and down, you can just scroll the mouse wheel up to move up or scroll it down to move down. A double click is when the user clicks the left mouse button twice in quick succession. Very often when you have something you can select by clicking on it once with the left mouse button, you often also can double click those things to open them or activate them. And what exactly it means to open something depends upon the context. But for example, the most common case of double clicking is on files. When you double click a file, the file opens. Now, a lot of users at first have trouble double clicking because they don't click quickly enough. What also tends to happen is that in between the first and second click, the user will move the mouse too much. And when you do that, it doesn't register as a double click. When you double click, you want the cursor to remain in the same place for both clicks. If it moves slightly, that's usually okay. But if it moves too much, it won't register as a double click. The good news, though, is that double clicking isn't all that necessary because you can always just select something and then hit the Enter key on the keyboard. And that usually does the same thing as double clicking something. Now we can talk about the Start menu. The Start menu I mentioned in passing is a menu which you get by clicking this button on the left of the taskbar. And it's what you use when you wish to start a program. It's also where you can go when you wish to open the Control panel and some commonly used folders. And we'll talk about the Control panel and folders in later units. The Start menu is also where you go when you wish to shut down the computer to turn it off or when you wish to restart the computer. That's what this button in the bottom right does. It's the button for shutdown and restart. Or I should say it's actually a pull down list. If you click that little triangle on the right, you'll see the button you click when you wish to restart instead of shutdown. These words along the right side of the Start menu are buttons for common folders and the Control panel, which again we'll discuss in a later unit. It's this white section along the left where you see the list of programs. If you look closely here, you'll see that these top three programs are divided from the rest of the list by a faint gray line. The programs in the top section of the list are the ones I've chosen to put there. They're called the pinned programs because I've explicitly pinned them to the Start menu so that they should always appear here at the top. The rest of the programs in the list here are recent programs. They are programs which I have opened recently. And as I launch other programs, this part of the list is updated automatically based upon what I've most recently opened. So the pinned programs here and the recent programs here are just a selection of all the programs I have installed on my system. If I want to see all of the programs that I have, I come down here to this button labeled All Programs. And when I click it, I get the scroll list containing everything, generally in alphabetical order. Now, perhaps you don't want to go into the full list to try and find a program or maybe you're trying to find a file. Well, you have this text box down at the bottom which you can type in to search. So for example, if I type W and O in this search box, then it shows me a list of search results which all match on the letters W followed by O. And here at the top of the search results, you can see it lists two programs, Microsoft Word and also WordPad. So supposing I wish to open Microsoft Word, I don't have to hunt through a list. I can just open the start menu type W and O. I don't even have to complete the whole word. I don't have to write W, O, R, D. And then I can select Word by clicking on it.