Appendix A

Quick-and-Dirty Windows 8.1

If you’re new to Microsoft Windows 8.1, you need to know a few things about the Windows 8.1 user interface. Although this appendix doesn’t reveal anything earthshaking, it does provide a quick-and-dirty overview of some basics you need to know to get around.

If you’ve used other Windows applications and have already spent at least a little bit of time using Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 (and so know how to start programs and how to stop Windows), you probably don’t need to read this appendix because you already know the material it covers.

I won’t bore you with technical details. The information here, though, will enable you not only to operate Quicken, but also to converse easily about the newest versions of Windows at cocktail parties, over lunch, or with the guy at the computer store.

If you want more information, you may want to read a book such as Windows 8.1 For Dummies, by Andy Rathbone (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

If you’re working with Windows Vista or Windows 7, much of what this appendix talks about also applies to your use of Quicken 2015.

What Is Windows 8.1?

Windows 8.1 — and when I use the term Windows 8.1 here, again, I mean any version of Microsoft Windows 8.1 — is an operating environment that manages your system resources (things like memory, your monitor, your printer, and so on).

Applications (programs such as Quicken) run on top of Windows 8.1. In other words, you start Windows 8.1 by turning on your personal computer (PC). Then, after Windows 8.1 is running, you can start applications, such as Quicken.

Windows 8.1 provides a standard graphical interface. In English, Windows 8.1 provides a common approach for using visual elements — tiles, icons, buttons, check boxes, and so on. (This appendix describes how the major pieces of this graphical interface work.)

Windows 8.1 enables you to run more than one application at a time. You may, for example, run Quicken; a tax preparation package; and a Windows accessory program, such as a web browser.

Starting Windows 8.1

Starting Windows 8.1 is easy. You just turn on your personal computer (PC). If you can find the on–off switch, you’re set.

If you can’t find the on–off switch, or it doesn’t seem to work, don’t feel silly. Ask someone who has used that computer. Sometimes the switch is on the front of the computer and is labeled On–Off (which makes good sense, of course). Sometimes, I’m afraid, manufacturers stick the on–off switch on the back of the computer or label the switch something really stupid, such as 0 and 1. Sometimes, too, people plug a computer and all its peripherals (printers, modems, and all that junk) into a power strip that needs to be turned on to turn on the computer. So just ask someone. (If you bought the computer, of course, you can just telephone the place you bought it from.)

Just so you don’t feel like a complete imbecile, I have to tell you something: I once had to call someone to find out how to click the stupid mouse that I got with my laptop computer.

Figure A-1 shows a typical Windows 8.1 Start screen. The Start screen is what you see after Windows 8.1 starts.

In earlier versions of Windows, you didn’t see a Start screen after you started Windows. Rather, you saw the desktop. You can still get (and easily get) to the desktop by clicking the rectangle labeled Desktop, which appears in the lower-left corner of the Start screen.

Starting Programs

To start a program like Quicken, you click the Quicken tile — which, after you’ve installed Quicken, appears someplace on the Start screen.

By the way, the tiles (those colorful rectangles) that appear on the Start screen are big — almost the size of small candy bars. Accordingly, you may need to scroll the Start screen left or right (using the left- and right-arrow buttons) to see the tile you want to click.

To practice this starting-a-program business, try starting the Quicken program by following these steps:

1. Locate the Quicken tile on the Start screen.

   The Quicken tile will probably be visible, but you may need to use the left- and right-arrow keys to locate the tile.

2. Click the tile for the program you want to start.

   Windows 8.1 opens Quicken. Figure A-2 shows the Quicken program window showing the home tab. (A program window is just the window that a program like Quicken displays.)

Choosing Commands from Menus

To set something in motion in Windows 8.1, you usually need to choose commands from menus.

I don’t know why they’re called commands. Perhaps because you often — but not always — use them to command Windows 8.1 and applications to do things (“Hello, Windows 8.1? I command thee to start this application” or “Quicken, I command thee to print this report”).

Most application windows have a menu bar — a row of menus across the top of the window. Predictably, not every menu bar contains the same menus, but they’re often darn similar. Some of the commands on the Quicken menus, for example, mirror commands on the Internet Explorer menus.

This menu similarity isn’t some nefarious conspiracy. The common command sets make things easier for users.

If you choose to read the next sections, don’t worry about what particular commands or menus do. Just focus on the mechanics of choosing commands.

Choosing commands with the furry little rodent

Oftentimes, the easiest way to choose a command is to use the mouse.

To select one of the menus by using a mouse, move the mouse pointer — the small arrow that moves across your screen as you physically roll the mouse across your desk — so that it points to the name of the menu that you want to select. Then click the mouse’s left button. Windows 8.1 or the application program displays the menu. Figure A-3 shows the Quicken File menu, for example. Now click the command that you want to choose. For example, if you want to click the first command listed on the menu, which happens to be New Quicken File, you click those words.

If you inadvertently display a menu, you can deselect it (that is, make it go away) by clicking anywhere outside the menu box.

Choosing commands by using Alt+key combinations

Another way to choose a command is to use an Alt key (cleverly labeled Alt), usually located at either end of the spacebar:

1. Press the Alt key.

   Doing so tells Windows 8.1 or the application that you want to choose a command by using your keyboard. After you do this, Windows underlines one of the letters in each menu name, as shown in Figure A-4. When you press the Alt key, for example, Windows underlines the letter F in File.

2. Press the letter representing the menu that you want to choose.

   Doing so tells Windows 8.1 or the application program which menu contains the command you want. Press F to select the File menu, for example.

3. Press the underlined letter of the command you want to choose.

   Each command on a menu is usually underlined, too, if you’ve pressed the Alt key. Accordingly, you can tell the program which command on a menu you want to choose by pressing the underlined letter of that command. If you’ve chosen the File menu, for example, you can choose the last option on the File menu, Exit, by pressing the letter X. (You can try choosing Exit if you want, but then restart Quicken so that you can continue to follow along, okay?)

Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 applications often offer yet another way to choose menu commands. After you press the Alt key, you can use the left- and right-arrow keys to highlight the menu that you want. Then press Enter. Windows 8.1 or the Windows 8.1 application displays the menu. Use the up- and down-arrow keys to highlight the command that you want to choose. Then press Enter.

If you want to deselect a menu but still leave the menu bar activated, press the Esc key once. To deselect the displayed menu and at the same time deactivate the menu bar, press the Esc key twice.

Context menus or shortcut menus

A quick point: Many Windows 8.1 applications display a menu, called a context menu or shortcut menu, if you right-click some part of the program window.

Within Quicken, if you right-click anything, Quicken displays a context menu of commands you might use to do something to or with the right-clicked object.

Using shortcut-key combinations

For many menu commands, Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 applications offer shortcut-key combinations. When you press a shortcut-key combination, Windows 8.1 or the Windows 8.1 application program simultaneously activates the menu bar, chooses a menu, and chooses a command.

Windows 8.1 (and application programs such as Quicken) displays the shortcut-key combination that you can use for a command on the menu beside the command.

If you take a peek back at Figure A-4, for example, you see that two of the commands listed on the File menu are followed by cryptic codes. Following the File⇒Open Quicken File command, for example, you can just barely make out the code Ctrl+O. And following the File⇒Print Home command, you can see the code Ctrl+P. These codes are the shortcut-key combinations. If you simultaneously press the two or three keys listed — the Ctrl key and the P key, for example — you choose the command. (Shortcut-key combinations often use funny keys — such as Ctrl, Alt, and Shift — in combination with letters or numbers. If you’re not familiar with some of these keys’ locations, check your keyboard.)

Disabled commands

Oh, jeepers, I almost forgot to tell you something. Not every menu command makes sense in every situation. So Windows 8.1 — and every Windows 8.1 application — disables commands that would be just plain kooky to choose. To show you when a command has been disabled, the program displays the disabled command in gray letters; commands you can choose show up in black letters. Figure A-4 shows no disabled commands, but on other menus, if you keep your eyes peeled, you see that Windows 8.1 or the Windows 8.1 applications sometimes disable commands that make no sense to use just now.

Let me make one other point about choosing commands in the Windows 8.1 environment. Windows 8.1, as the screen shots in this book show, makes your computing experience as visual and graphical as possible. Accordingly, if Windows 8.1 or a program designed for Windows 8.1 can replace a boring old menu command with a clickable picture or icon, that’s how it appears.

The Internet Explorer program does this visualization quite a bit. I’m not going to show you a picture of this program here in the pages of this book, but if you start the Internet Explorer program, you can see (in the lower right and left corners) buttons with arrows that point left and right. And if you click one of these buttons, you move to the last web page you were viewing or the next web page you just moved back from. Quicken 2015 doesn’t make fetishlike use of command icons. But if you poke around Windows 8.1 much — or if you work with other Microsoft programs, such as Internet Explorer — you’ll see what I mean. Oh, baby, will you see what I mean.

Working with Dialog Boxes

Windows 8.1 (and Windows programs like Quicken) uses a special type of window, called a dialog box, to communicate with you. In fact, after you choose a command, Windows 8.1 and application programs often display a dialog box to get the information they need to carry out the command.

Dialog boxes have these unique design elements: text boxes, check boxes, tabs, option buttons (also called radio buttons), command buttons, and list boxes.

Text boxes

Text boxes provide spaces in which you can enter text. To see what a text box looks like (and I’m assuming that you’ve still got Quicken running), choose the Edit⇒Find command. Quicken, responding nicely to your deft touch, displays the Quicken Find dialog box (shown in Figure A-5). The text box is the box to the left of the button labeled Find and in the figure shows the date 6/30/2014.

If the selection cursor — the flashing line or outline that selects the active element of a dialog box — isn’t already in the text box, you need to move it there by clicking in the text box. Then type the text. If this “active element” mumbo-jumbo seems too technical, just press Tab a bunch of times and watch the dialog box. See that thing that moves around from box to button to box? It selects the active element.

You can move the selection cursor in several ways:

• Click inside the text box.
• Press Tab or Shift+Tab until the selection cursor is in the text box. (Pressing Tab moves the selection cursor to the next element; pressing Shift+Tab moves the selection cursor to the preceding element.)
• Press the Alt+key combination, if available. In Figure A-5, the text box holding the date is unlabeled. But if the text box were labeled, as some text boxes are, the program typically underlines one of the letters in the label. In Figure A-5, for example, the label Find (which labels another box) has the letter i underlined. In this case, you can press Alt+I to move the selection cursor to that box.

If you make a typing mistake in the text box, press the Backspace key to erase incorrect characters. Other editing tricks are available, but I don’t describe them here. (After all, this chapter is just a quick-and-dirty overview of Windows 8.1.)

You also can move the insertion bar — the vertical line that shows where your type gets placed — by using the left- and right-arrow keys. The left-arrow key moves the insertion bar one character to the left without deleting any characters. The right-arrow key moves the insertion bar one character to the right without deleting any characters.

Check boxes

Check boxes work like on–off switches. A check box is “on” if the box is selected with a check mark. A check box is “off” if the box is empty. Figure A-5, earlier in this appendix, shows the Search Backwards check box turned on.

To turn a check box on or off with the mouse, click the check box. If the check box is on, your click turns off the check box. If the check box is off, your click turns on the check box.

You also can use the spacebar to select and deselect a check box. After you move the selection cursor to the check box, press the spacebar to alternately select and deselect the check box. Toggle, toggle, toggle.

Tabs

Figure A-5 doesn’t use them, but sometimes tabs appear in dialog boxes. Click a tab to see it when a dialog box has multiple tabs.

Option buttons

Option buttons (or radio buttons) are sets of buttons representing mutually exclusive choices. Figure A-5 doesn’t show option buttons, but take a peek at the dialog box shown in Figure A-6. If you want to follow along, display this dialog box by selecting Quicken’s Edit⇒Preferences command and then clicking the Write Checks entry in the list of preferences. The Preferences dialog box does show a set of Printed Date Style option buttons — 4-Digit Year and 2-Digit Year — to let you specify how you printed dates appear.

You can select only one option button in a set. Windows 8.1 or the Windows 8.1 application identifies the selected button by putting a bullet, or darkened circle, inside the button. In Figure A-6, for example, the 4-Digit Year option button is selected. The easiest way to select an option button is to click the option button you want.

Command buttons

Every dialog box has command buttons. Command buttons tell Windows 8.1 or an application program what you want to do after you finish using a dialog box.

Figure A-5, earlier in this appendix, shows command buttons labeled Find, Find All, and Close. If you were really working with the Quicken Find dialog box (and you’re not; you and I are just playing around here), you’d click Find or Find All after completing the rest of the dialog box. If you didn’t want to use the Find dialog box after all, you’d click Close.

Figure A-6 shows two command buttons: OK and Cancel. If you click OK, you tell the Windows application to follow your command. If you click Cancel, you tell the application (basically), “Oh, never mind.”

To choose a command button, click it, or move the selection cursor to a command button and then press Enter.

The small box marked with an X that appears in the upper-right corner of dialog boxes and windows is a command button too. You can click this command button, called a Close box, to cancel a dialog box or close a window. If you’ve been following along on your computer with me and you started the Notepad program, for example, you can click the Close box to close that program.

List boxes

List boxes list a series of possible choices. And to select an entry in a list box, you just click the entry you want.

Note, though, that Windows 8.1 serves up two flavors of list box: a regular list box (which is always displayed) and a drop-down list box, like the one shown in Figure A-7. (This particular list box appears if you select the Calendar and Currency entry in the Select Preference Type list of the Preferences dialog box, click the Fiscal Year option button, and then click the Starting Month box.)

Drop-down list boxes initially look like text boxes with a down-arrow key at the right end of the box before you “drop” them. To drop the list down, you click the down arrow. After you do this, the list box looks and works like a regular list box. You select an entry, for example, by clicking it.

And a final point: Unfortunately, sometimes a list is too long for the list box to display completely. (This is not the case in Figure A-6.) When this minor tragedy occurs, you can use the PgUp and PgDn keys to page through the list.

You also can use the scroll bar — the vertical bar with arrows at either end. Just drag the square scroll-bar selector up or down. You also can click the arrows at either end of the scroll bar, or you can click the scroll bar itself. (This last trick moves the scroll-bar selector toward the place where you clicked.)

Stopping Quicken in Windows 8.1

To stop an application program such as Quicken, either click the program’s Close box — the button with the X in it that appears in the top-right corner of the application window — or choose File⇒Exit.

A Yelp for Help

Help, a separate application within Windows 8.1, has powerful tools to help you find out more about Windows 8.1 and application programs, such as Internet Explorer and Quicken. To access Help, select the Help menu or click the ? icon.

The Quicken 2015 Help menu (see Figure A-8) lists nine commands: Getting Started Guide, Quicken Help, View Guidance, Quicken Live Community, Quicken Support, Submit Feedback on Quicken, Privacy Preferences, Log Files, and About Quicken. In the following paragraphs, I briefly describe how each command shown in Figure A-8 works.

The Getting Started Guide command

The Getting Started Guide command displays windows that list Quicken Help topics related to getting the Quicken program set up and to getting started using Quicken.

The Quicken Help command

If you choose Help⇒Quicken Help, the Help program displays a window (shown in Figure A-9) that has two tabs: Contents and Search Quicken Help.

The Contents tab lists some of the major Help topic categories. To display the topics within a particular category, double-click the Help topic category. Help expands the list to show the topics within each category. Double-click a topic to display the Help information on that topic.

You can click the Search Quicken Help tab (shown in Figure A-10) to search the Help topics. To use the Search tab, enter your search words, or keywords, in the first text box and then select the Help topic in the last list box.

The View Guidance command

The View Guidance command tells Quicken to turn on Quicken Qcards, which are little sticky-note-like things that provide tips and helpful nuggets of information about working with Quicken.

The Quicken Live Community command

The Quicken Live Community command connects you to an Intuit-sponsored Quicken support-forums website (https://qlc.intuit.com) so that you can discuss Quicken problems and solutions with other Quicken users.

The Quicken Support command

The Quicken Support command opens a web page at Intuit’s product support website for Quicken. There’s lots of good information here.

The Submit Feedback on Quicken command

The Submit Feedback on Quicken command opens a web page that you can use to submit suggestions, share comments, or report bugs. If you have something to say about Quicken to Intuit, this command is the way you do it.

The Privacy Preferences command

This command displays information about the ways that Intuit attempts to keep your financial data secure and about the business practices that Intuit employs. The command also provides a couple of check boxes you can use to tell Intuit whether you’re cool with its collection of usage statistics. If you’re not, you clear some check boxes; then your copy of Quicken won’t share information with Intuit about how easily Quicken connects to your online banking vendor and so on.

The Log Files command

The Log Files command displays a web page with links you can click to easily access the log files that Quicken maintains. You may want to use this command if some part of the Quicken program goes haywire, you need to call Intuit’s technical support, and then the technical support folks want or need to know what in the world happened.

The About Quicken command

The About Quicken command displays a dialog box that lists the application’s complete name (such as Quicken Premier 2015). To remove this dialog box from the screen, click OK.

The Add Tools commands

Though Figure A-8 doesn’t show them, some versions of Quicken Help menus include one or more Add commands. Depending on the version of Quicken that you’re working with, you might see commands such as Business Tools, Rental Property Tools, Retirement & Other Planning Tools, or even More Investing & Tax Tools.

These commands let you upgrade automatically to more expensive versions of Quicken.

The Register Quicken command

The Register Quicken command opens a web page you can use to register your copy of Quicken by answering questions such as what your name is, where you purchased Quicken, and what the cube root of 1331 is.

Quitting Windows 8.1

To quit Windows 8.1 (and I grant that this may just be the screwiest feature of the new Windows), you move the mouse into the upper-right corner of the screen so that Windows displays the Charms bar, which is a slide-out menu of five icons: Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. Click the Settings icon and then click the Power button you see. When Windows 8.1 displays the pop-up menu, choose the Shut Down command. Unbelievable.