Dialog Boxes

What Are Dialog Boxes and How Do You Survive Them?

Dialog boxes appear in order to give you the opportunity to "dialog", i.e.: tell the computer what you want it to do.

Note:

Dialog boxes work the same way for both Windows and Mac. For that reason I'll use screen shots from both Windows and Mac interchangeably.

Just because they're common doesn't mean you may understand how to use dialog boxes! Here's the basic intro:

Rule #1: When a dialog box comes up and you don't like it or understand it: Click Cancel or OK (in that order) to get rid of it.

"Cancel and OK are your friends!"

Activity 1: Opening and Getting Out of a Dialog Box

1) Open any program on your Windows or Macintosh computer.

If you don't know how to do this, click below. Clicking on these links will open another browser window with explanations and instructions on how to open applications on the kind of computer you've got. Once you've opened an application, close that new browser window and you'll be right back here!

I have a Mac

I have a Windows PC

2) Call down the File Menu and click on Page Setup... menu item. This will open the Page Setup dialog box. A typical Page Setup dialog box looks something like this:

Mac:

Win:

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Notes:

This will open the Page Setup dialog box. You would use this dialog box to set preferences for printing a document.

Note that some menu items have "..." after them and others don't. If you excecute a menu item that has "..." then you'll get a dialog box while menu items that don't have "..." will just execute that menu command. (This is true for both Mac and Windows.)

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3) Now that you've got a dialog box open, click on the Cancel button. That will make the the dialog box go away. (Note that Cancel is not the same as OK. Cancel means go away. OK means go ahead and do the deed. That's why I suggest Cancel before OK.)

Activity 2: Make some Choices

1) Call up the Page Setup... dialog box again.

2) Note that some of the items or choices have little down pointing triangles . These indicate pop-down menus. If you click on these, you'll get a set of options. You can change the options as you like.

3) Some of the fields in the Page Setup... dialog box allow you to edit text. In the case of this screen shot you click to change the number to a different number. This is another way to use a dialog box.

Alert Dialog Boxes

In addition to dialog boxes that allow you to change settings, you will see dialog boxes that just inform or alert you to some information. These will not have pop-down menus or editable fields but will have just OK buttons to click to allow you to confirm that you've gotten the word.

Here are screen shots of Mac and Windows Alert Dialog boxes:

You see how there are no choices or options except for OK.

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