Hour 9. Adding Menus and Toolbars to Forms

What You’ll Learn in This Hour: Adding, moving, and deleting menu items Creating checked menu items Programming menus Implementing context menus Assigning shortcut keys Creating toolbar items Defining toggle buttons and separators Creating a status bar

The graphical user interface (GUI) you can use to interact with and navigate programs is one of the greatest features of Windows. Despite this, a number of Windows users still rely primarily on the keyboard, preferring to use the mouse only when absolutely necessary. Data-entry people in particular never take their hands off the keyboard. Many software companies receive support calls from angry customers because a commonly used function is accessible only by using the mouse. Menus are the easiest way to navigate your program for a user who relies on the keyboard, and Visual Basic makes it easy than ever to create menus for your applications. In this hour, you’ll learn how to build, manipulate, and program menus on a form. In addition, I’ll teach you how to use the Toolbar control to create attractive and functional toolbars. Finally, you’ll learn how to finish a form with a status bar.