Demo: Working with programs

To get the most out of your software programs, you should know how to find, start, install, and remove them from your computer.

The Start menu is the best way to find programs on your computer. Programs that you've used frequently are listed here, for quick access.

To see a complete list of programs on your computer, you click All Programs. The Accessories folder contains many useful programs. To start a program, you click the one that you want to use. Notice how it opens in its own window.

You can also start a program by double-clicking a file that uses that program. For example, double-clicking this document opens WordPad, a word processing program that comes with Windows.

Most programs contain menus that you use to select commands. To open a menu, you click the menu's title. And to choose a command, you click it. Let's click New to create a new document.

Toolbars are a convenient way to choose commands with one click. For example, we can save our new document by clicking the Save button. We'll type a name for the document, and then click Save.

The Start menu makes it easy to find documents you've used recently. Here's the one we just saved. You can also use the Start menu to search for programs. You type part of the program's name in the Search box, and then click a search result to open the program.

We now have several programs running at once. See how all of them are shown here on the taskbar? To switch to any program that's running, you click its taskbar button…like this. And to hide a program—or minimize it—you click here. It will stay minimized on the taskbar until you need it again.

To close a program, you click the Close button in the top corner of its window. Notice how its icon is removed from the taskbar.

The programs we've used so far came installed on Windows, but you can install other programs too. Most programs you get will come on a CD or DVD or can be downloaded from the Internet. If it's on a CD or DVD, you put the disc in the drive and follow the instructions that appear on your screen. After you install a program, it will show up here in the All Programs list that we saw earlier.

And if you want to remove a program, you can uninstall it. In Control Panel, you click Uninstall a program. Click the program you want to remove, and then click Uninstall. Windows removes the program from your computer.

And those are the basics for working with the programs on your computer.