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The use of windowing
environment has changed the day to day usage of the computer. Now a
person can easily use computer without much expertise with the help
of windows. The window environment of an operating system is also
known as the Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). The user is not
required to remember the commands to perform some operation (either
normal or administrative). All the operations can be done with some
mouse clicks over few buttons or other window controls. In this
paper, we will talk about the different windows controls of
Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft has designed many
controls which assist us to accomplish certain task easily using the
computer. Let us discuss some of them one by one.
Edit Box Control
This is a simplest window control used to enter some text in to it.
The edit box control may be of two different styles – single line
control or multi-line control. In single line control only one line
text can be entered. The line will be assumed finished once you
press ENTER button of the keyboard. In contrast, multi-line edit box
control can accommodate multiple-line text in to it.
Button Control
There exist many type of button controls as written under.
• Push button control
• Radio button control
• Check box control
Push Button Control
It is rectangular size window control that can be pressed using the
mouse button. This type of button control is used to send a message
to the application software to perform some designated task. The
user defined labels/ bitmap can also be placed on top of the push
button controls.
Radio Button Control
These buttons are round in shape. The selected button shows a black
dot inside the circular shape of the button. These type of buttons
are used to select one out of many choices. So if there are four
radio buttons and they are grouped together, only one button can be
selected at a time. The selected button ID is sent to the
application software for the proper action. It is called a radio
button because it resembles the concept of buttons in a radio set
that are used to select a particular radio station. A particular
radio station can be tuned at a particular time.
Check Box Control
This window control is similar to the radio button control but it
differs in selection criteria. This control is used to select
multiple choices out of the given list. For example, if there are
four check boxes, user can select zero, one, two, three or all four
at a time. The selected choices are sent to the application software
for the processing.
List View Control
This window control is used to present a comprehensive list of
items. Each item in the list can have an icon and text associated
with it. Each item can have other supplementary information also
attached with the item. It can present the list in four different
styles. These styles are popularly knows as ‘Tiles’, ‘Icons’,
‘List’, ‘Details’. In ‘Tiles’ mode, the items are shown in a
multiple columns with large icon and other information displayed
side by side. In ‘Icons’ mode, the small iconic image for each item
and the primary brief info is displayed. In the ‘List’ mode, the
icon and the corresponding primary text is shown. In ‘Details’ mode,
the complete information of each item along with its icon is
presented row-wise.
Animate Control
This is a control which basically adds glamour to the look and feel
of the window based applications. This is a rectangular control. An
AVI (audio video interleaved ) object can be attached with this
control either at the time of creation or the runtime. This control
plays the AVI file when the application software generate ‘play’
command for it. This control presently does not support sound so use
only video files without the audio.
Progress Bar Control
This is a common control of the Microsoft windows operating system.
It is a passive control. It generally does not require user input.
It is used to give the feedback to the user about the status of the
completeness of some task. It is very useful for the user as user is
given status of the completeness and the idea of probable remaining
time.
Slider Control
It is also called track bars. These controls are used to select a
particular value from a given range. The best real life example is
the equalizer knobs of your stereo system. The knob of the slider
can be moved over the given range using the mouse to select the
appropriate value.
Tab Control
If you want to display multiple pages of information, you can either
do it with separate dialog window for each page or on a single
dialog window using the tab control. These tabs can be selected by
mouse to display the concerned page of information either for
viewing or editing.
Tool Tip Control
This is the smallest and I hope, the simplest window control in the
Microsoft operating system. These small rectangular box size windows
are used to display help text related to some other controls
available in the application software. When user places the mouse
cursor over some control and waits for few milliseconds, the
tool-tip window appears with the help text. It automatically
disappears once the mouse is moved.
We have covered few controls from the exhaustive list of controls
supported by the Microsoft windows. But the controls discussed here
are most common controls used by most of the application software.
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