Chapter 7

Designing and Developing Menus

What is a Menu or a Toolbar?

Menus- are controls that allow us to select some items that can help to accomplish our task.
Ex: saving documents, copying or pasting a paragraph or cutting some parts of it, or printing a
document that we write.

Toolbar- located right below the menu titles in almost all application software.
- represented by icons that signify their use such as a blank paper sheet icon for creating a new
document, a picture of a diskette for saving your document, and a picture of a printer to print
your presently typed document.

- can provide us a quick access to the most frequently use menu commands in an application such
as opening, saving or printing a document.

When we create a large application system, we need to use menus and toolbars to organize each
subsystems effectively and efficiently.

In designing and developing menus and toolbars, we have to make it sure that they conform to the
Windows graphical user-interface (GUI) standards, so that user can easily adapt them for their daily use.

Menus and toolbars provide a compact way to organize the commands that make our application
system work and provide convenient way to access the functionality within it.

Menus and toolbars save user’s desktop space, because they only occupy space when activated

Microsoft Windows application systems menu consist of one or more of the following features:

Menus- the first or top-level menu items that are immediately visible at the menu bar.
Menu Items- additional menu items residing under menus, each of which represents a choice
for a user to make
Sub menus- are collection of menu items accessed through a parent menu item
Access keys- are keyboard keys that are used in conjunction with the ALT key which will trigger a
menu or menu item to activate when pressed simultaneously.
Shortcuts- are special keyboard keys with a specific function such as F5 (for start Debugging), or
F1 (for help).
Separators- are horizontal lines used to organize menu items into logical groups.

Adding Menus

MenuStrip control- a tool we used to add menus into the form

- can be found in Toolbox under the Menu and Toolbars group.
- can add new menus, modify or reorder existing menus, or delete old menus.
 - can enhance also menus with special effects such as keyboard shortcuts, access keys, and check
marks.
- with this control, we can design a professional-looking menus, however, we will still need to
provide the code behind each menu items so that they would work in accordance to our wishes.

Example 1: Design and develop a simple menu-based application system that demonstrates how to
create a simple menu system with the following menu title: Menu 1, menu2, and Menu3.

Example 2:

Design and develop a simple menu-based application system that demonstrates how to create a simple
menu system with the following title: Menu1, Menu2 and Menu3.

Note:
Between Menu 1 Item4 (M1 Item4) and Exit menu item is a line separator.

Menu 2 Item1 (M2 Item1) and Menu 2 Item 3 (M2 Item3) are checked, while Menu 2 Item 2 was
disabled by default. This will be enabled once the Menu 3 Item 2 is clicked.

Once the Menu 3 Item 1 (M3 Item 1) is clicked, the hidden Menu3 Item2 (M3 Item2) will appear
suddenly.

The M3 Item 1 should contain a ToolTip Text property that states “When clicked, triggers the hidden M3
item2 to appear suddenly!”

The M3 Item 2 should contain a ToolTipText property that states “When clicked, triggers the M2Item2
to be enabled.”