- Making Your Programs Do What You Want Them to Do
- Now What? Getting a Program to Do Something Useful
- Switching from One Program to Another
- When Enough's Enough: Quitting a Program
- The Least You Need to Know
When Enough's Enough: Quitting a Program
When you're finished with a particular program, you should close it to keep your screen uncluttered and to reduce the load on Windows' resources. The easiest way to do this is to click the Close button—the X in the upper-right corner of the program's window.
You can also use a few other methods, which you may find faster under certain circumstances:
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Press Alt+F4.
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Pull down the program's File menu and select the Exit command (or, more rarely, the Close command).
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Right-click the program's taskbar button and then click Close in the little menu that appears.
Cross Reference-
See "The All-Important Save Command" on p. 63.
Depending on the program you're closing and the work you were doing with it, you might be asked whether you want to "save" some files. I tell you how to handle saving documents in Chapter 5, "Saving, Opening, Printing, and Other Document Lore."
Other Ways to Switch Programs
Besides clicking the taskbar buttons, Windows Millennium gives you three other ways to leap from one running program to another:
Click the program's window This is perhaps the simplest and most obvious method. All you do is point the mouse inside the program's window and then click. This method is most useful if your hand is already on the mouse and you can see at least part of the window you want to activate.
Hold down Alt and tap Tab When you do this, Windows Millennium displays a box that boasts an icon for each running program. Each time you press Tab, the next icon gets highlighted. After you highlight the icon for the program you want, release the Alt key; Windows Millennium then switches to the program. This technique is useful if your hands are on the keyboard and you have only a few programs running.
Hold down Alt and tap Esc This method is similar to the Alt+Tab method in that Windows Millennium cycles through the open programs. The difference is that with each tap of the Esc key, Windows Millennium brings each program window to the fore. Use this method when you want to check out the contents of each window before you decide which program you want to work with.