Dealing with Windows Dialog Boxes

When the computer interacts with you — that is, when it has a question to ask, or when it needs more information to complete a task — it usually puts a dialog box on the screen. A dialog box is nothing more or less than a window that requires your attention.

Figure 1 shows a dialog box that illustrates how the various standard Windows components can be used to extract information from unsuspecting Dummies.

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: 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.

• The X (Close) button: The X 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 X 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.

You can usually hop from one part of a dialog box to the next by pressing the Tab key. Press Shift+Tab to move backward. 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.

Back in the good old days, option buttons were called radio buttons. They act like the buttons on a radio: Push one, and a station plays; push a different button, and a different station kicks in. You can't have two different buttons pushed in at the same time. Old-fashioned radios had mechanical buttons that would pop in and out, reminiscent of the way Windows radio buttons work.

• Command buttons: These buttons tell the dialog box to get on with it. Click a command button, and the dialog box does something.

Usually it's pretty obvious when you can change things in a dialog box: Text that can't be changed generally appears against a gray background, for example, whereas text that can be changed frequently appears on a white background. Unfortunately, programmers aren't the most consistent folks in the world, and sometimes what you see on the screen is a bit nonstandard.