Introduction, Resizing windows, Moving windows, Switching between programs, The tab key, Minimising and Maximising windows, When to use the X button, When to use the right mouse button, Copy and paste, Keyboard methods for precision scrolling and selection, Multi-selection in a list, Glossary, Note about this document
First, a bit of history. The original version of Windows was quite primitive by modern standards. It let you have several windows at once, but they had to be tiled – the screen was divided into a whole lot of rectangles on the screen. This had the disadvantage that if you had more than four or five windows showing, they would be very tiny.
The solution was the resizable and movable overlapped popup window. This is a marvellous invention, but you need to know how to use it to work with Windows to its full potential. Many quite experienced Windows users whoo have had a computer for maybe several years don’t know how to move and resize windows. That’s because it isn’t immediately apparent how to use this feature – you need to have it explained. But this isn’t explained in the Windows help – it is just assumed you know how to do it!
There are quite a few other things of this nature that need to be explained in order to use Windows to its full potential.
See also Keyboard shortcuts for Windows
At the top of the window you see a broad bar. Often it has the name of the program you are using, and the name of the current document, like this:
This is known as the Title Bar.
You can use this to move the window. Click within the area where the title is shown. Then keep the mouse held down, and drag, and you will find you can move it wherever you like on the screen.
Hover the mouse over the lower right corner of this window and you will see a double headed diagonal arrow:
Click with the left mouse button while this arrow is showing. Make sure that it is still showing after you click - if it changes to the ordinary single arrow, try again.
Now, with the mouse button still held down, cdrag the mouse.. Make sure that it continues to show a double headed arrow as you drag, and you will find that the window changes shape.
When you reach the edge of the mouse mat and have to lift up the mouse, you will lose the double headed arrow. So when that happens, just click on the edge of the window to get it back again, and keep going from where you reached before.
You can also hover the mouse over any of the other corners of the window or its edges to change its shape.
Sometimes you may need to resize a window which goes below the bottom of your screen or outside it to left or right. You need to move it into view first by dragging on the title bar. Occasionally you may find it is too large to see both the top and bottom of the window, usually because the bottom is hidden by the task bar at the bottom of your screen. If so, drag downwards on the top of the window to reduce its height, then drag on the title bar to move it upwards again, and keep doing this until it is small enough so that you can see the bottom of the window too.
You can also minimise and maximise it using the buttons at upper right next to the X Close button:
Most experienced windows users will know about this already.
Keyboard shortcut. Use Alt + space and you bring up a menu called the System Menu. Choose Size, and you will be able to resize the window using the up, down, left and right arrow keys.
You can usually tell if a window can be resized by the border – it will often have a thick “resizing” border. Otherwise, hover the mouse over the edge and see if you see a double arrow – if you see one, then you can resize it.
Look at the bottom of the window and you will see a bar with all the currently running programs like this:
This shows all the main programs you are running at present – here, this current document in Word, Paint for the picture editing, and Windows Explorer which I have running to find things.
This is known as the Task bar.
Click on any of the programs and you will switch to it. That program goes into the foreground, and the other ones go into the background behind it.
You can also switch between programs using the Tab key – see next section.
Sometimes it is useful to minimise all your currently running programs in one go, and show the desktop. To do this, click on the Windows button on your keyboard – the one with a Windows logo flag symbol on it. With it held down, press D. Repeat this shortcut to show all your windows again.
This is the key above the Caps lock key at the left of the keyboard – with arrows pointing to a line. It's original use was to make tables in documents – tabs are spaced every so often across the document, e.g. every four spacess.
It still has that role in Windows – but has also taken on a life of its own. It’s very commonly used for keyboard shortcuts.
One of the most useful is the Alt + Tab shortcut. Hold down the Alt key. Then with it still held down, press tab once and release it, keeping the Alt key still pressed, and you will see a list of all currently running programs, with the one you are working on highlighted (maybe with a line drawn around it).
Now with the Alt key still down, press tab several times and you will find that you can move the highlight to another program. Release the Alt key and you will switch to that program. Once you are used to it, this is a quick way to switch between programs that you have running.
Alt + Shift + Tab switches between them in reverse order.
Look at the top right of a window and you see three buttons – the X button to close it, the maximise button, and the left-most one is the minimise button.
If you click the minimise button, the window disappears from the screen - it hasn't actually vanished though, it has just been minimised. All that is left of it is the button for it on the task bar.
Click on the task bar to show it again.
The maximise button resizes it to fill the screen. You will see the symbol change like this
It’s been changed to a Restore button. Click on this to restore it to the size it had before you maximised it.
The X button got introduced with Windows 95. Before then you had to use Alt + F4 to close the current window (this is the F4 function key at the top of the keyboard) or click at top left of the window for the system menu (or use Alt + Space to show it) and close it from there. The quick way to close it used to be a double click at top left of the window - which still works too
Howeever, now it is much easier to close a window than it was before – and many programs rely on you using the X button to do that. They no longer put Ok or Cancel or Close buttons into every window that needs to be closed, as they did before. This makes life easier – but you need to know when it is appropriate to use the close button and when not to use it.
Every program has a main window, usually the one you see when it first runs (after the splash screen if any). When you close the main window, the program exits, and all its "Child windows" too also close, so only use the X button there when you have finished your work.
In the case of any other window, see if it is the type that has a title bar that you can drag to move it around. If so, you will normally be expected to close it with the X button when you are finished. If unsure, try moving the window you are using out of the way, or minimising it. If you see the main window of the program behind it, then you can usually close it with the X button without closing the main program.
Sometimes areas of a window have little X buttons you can use to close them - such as the Favourites area in Explorer, if you show this from View | Explorer Bar. Close those only if you don't want to see that area any more.
In the case of Internet Explorer and other web browsers, often you find thatall the windows look the same, so there is no main window really - or maybe better to say, they are all man windows.
There the rule is that if possible use the Back button, but if there isn’t one or it is disabled, go back to the previous window by using the X to close your current window. If in doubt, as before, move the current window out of the way and see if you find another one behind it. If you do then you can use the X button to close it because you have the older one to fall back on when that happens.
When you right click on a window, often you will see a short "floating menu" pop up. This is the Right Click Context menu. It is so called because it depends on the context – each window has its own version of it. The idea of this menu is to provide things specific to that window or program. You can then select one of the options in that list, either with the left or right buttons.
Usually it includes copy and paste options – see next section. Word has other options like Font…, amd Paragraph… . Basically, try the right click out in any program, and in various areas of the program, and see what you have available to do. So, the rule here is, use the right button for the context menu options – and the left button for everything else.
Some programs use the left and right buttons in special ways – in which case normally it gets explained in the help for the program.
Often you may want to move text or images from place to place in a document, or move them between windows. In the old MSDOS days each program had its own way of doing this. Now in windows, there is one uniform way that all programs use. This makes life much easier than it was before as there is only the one method to learn – but again of course, you need to know how to do it.
The windows solution was to make a special area called the Clipboard to hold the text and images. You copy something into the clipboard, and then later you can paste it from the clipboard back into your document, or into another program.
Usually you highlight whatever you want to copy first. To highlight text, clickto place the caret (the vertical line for the current typing position) in front of the text you want to move. Drag to extend the highlight as far as you want it to go.
Now Right click on your selection, and choose Copy – and that will put it into the clipboard. You can also copy it using Edit | Copy in many programs, and you can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C to copy.
Now click to place the caret where you want the text to go, and use Right click then Paste, and you will find it gets placed there. The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl + V
Sometimes rather than copy it, you want to move it – e.g. move a sentence, paragraph or chapter, deleting the original. To do that, you first move it into the clipboard rather than copy it, which you do by selecting Cut rather than Copy, shortcut Ctrl + X. Then use Paste as before.
First, the scrolling. When you are reading a document or web page, anyone with a bit of experience knows that you can use the scroll bar to move up / down. But, if you have a long document to read – isn’t it a bit wearing sometimes the way you have to drag the bar down by just exactly the right amount to get to the next section of the document?
Well, there is a solution to that which the Windows programmers once more have worked out, which is excellent, except that as before, many don’t know about it. You need to be told about it.
What you do is to use the Page up and Page down keys. These move you through the document one page at a time – where a page here means the amount of text you can fit within the window. Problem solved – when you finish reading what you can see at present on the screen, press the Page down key to go to the next part of it – and no more fiddling around with the scroll bar to do that! You can also use the up /down arrows to move the page up / down one line at a time.
One thing you find when highlighting text to copy and paste is that if you drag to extend the highlight beyond the bottom of the window, the document will suddenly fly up to extend the selection, and you may find that you have highlighted far more than you intended to do.
This is normal, and the solution is to use the keyboard instead of the mouse. As before, click to place the caret at the start of the selection. Then hold down the Shift key, and with it held down, press the arrow keys, or page up and page down, and you will probably find that you can extend the selection more precisely than you can with the mouse. You can also hold down the Ctrl + arrow to move the caret one word at a time - this works in most text areas – so use Ctrl + shift + arrow to extend the selection one word at a time.
Ah, this is a real labour saver. Have you ever wanted to move twenty files in one go, or to delete twenty e-mails. The usual solution people use is to move them one at a time, or click each e-mail they want to delete and delete it one at a time. But, you can do it all in one go easily!
What you do is to use various combinations of Shift, and Control + Click.
Suppose you want to delete several consecutive e-mails – click on the first one you want to delete. Then use shift + click on the last one. Then press the Delete key and you can delete them all in one go.
If they aren’t consecutive, use Ctrl + click on each in turn until you have highlighted all the ones you want to delete, then delete them all in one go.
You can also use Ctrl + Shift + click – here the idea is to use Ctrl + click on the first one you want to delete,then Ctrl + shift + click on the last one. That adds all those to the highlight, while keeping any ones you have highlighted before still highlighted.
If this isn't quite clear yet, just experiment with highlighting entries in a list of e-mails or files, say, and see what happens.
Clipboard – the area in Windows where text, pictures etc. get placed when you use the Copy command.
Right click context menu – the menu that pops up when you use Right click on many windows.
System menu – the menu you can bring up using Alt + Space, with options Restore, Move, Size, Minimise, Maximise and Close.
Tab key – the fourth key up from the left on the keyboard with arrow + line markings on it. Used to insert tabs into documents to make tables – but also in windows shortcuts such as Alt + tab.
Task bar – the bar at the bottom of the screen showing all your currently active programs
Title bar – the text area at the top of a window. Click and drag to move the window.