The main screen serves as the background on top of which other windows appear to perform tasks. There are three elements to Main Display:
| Main Menu | This is the second line on the screen. It lists a series of horizontal menu options. These are the Main Menu Options: the main categories of tasks that this program can perform. All tasks are initiated from the Main Menu. Press <Enter> on one of these or the highlighted letter in its name, and a drop down vertical Submenu will appear. This Submenu is then used to select, from a group of related items, a specific activity to be performed.
The drop down menu choices consist of the tasks that actually do something. They may be selected, like the Main Menu, by moving the highlight bar to the desired choice and pressing <Enter> or by pressing the first letter of the selection’s name. To exit from a lower menu and return to the preceding level in the menu structure, you normally press <Esc>. At the Main Menu, however, you can move from one Submenu horizontally by pressing the Left or Right arrow keys. This makes moving between Submenus much easier. So you do things in Simple Accounting by moving from the Main Menu to the drop submenu, and so forth, down a series of related menus till you get to the specific action you wish to perform. |
| Tool Bar | Underneath the main menu is a series of buttons which you can click on to get immediate access to the most often performed tasks. Together these are known as a toolbar. Once opened, these functions can be left open enabling you to work on several tasks simultaneously. For example, you could open the Sales Orders icon and the Calculator and leave these active while opening the Products icon to review an item for sale.
If you forget the meaning of a toolbar icon, simply place the mouse pointer over the icon for a second and a Tool Tip will appear describing its purpose.
|
 |
If you like, you can hide the tool bar in order to gain more screen space by either pressing <Ctrl/T> or from the main menu under WINDOWS|Tool Bar. This can be helpful if you are using a smaller monitor or if you like to keep multiple windows open at the same time. |
|
In addition to clicking on each button, you can also use an accelerator keystroke shortcut for each of the toolbar functions by pressing <Ctrl+Alt+key> where key is the highlighted letter of each functions description.
Example: Press <Ctrl+Alt+Y> to open the Payments Browse. |
| Status Line | At the bottom of the screen, the currently selected task appears at the left, with the system date and time to the right. In the center, the status of Print Preview is displayed. |
