When you get right down to it, an operating system like Windows is nothing more than a home base from which to launch applications (programs). And you, as a Windows person, are particularly fortunate, since more programs are available for Windows than any other operating system on earth.
But when you launch a program, you’re no longer necessarily in the world Microsoft designed for you. Programs from other software companies work a bit differently, and there’s a lot to learn about how Windows XP handles programs that were born before it was.
This chapter covers everything you need to know about installing, removing, launching, and managing programs; using programs to generate documents; and understanding how documents, programs, and Windows communicate with each other.
Windows XP lets you launch (open) programs in many different ways:
Choose a program’s name from the Start→All Programs menu.
Click a program’s icon on the Quick Launch toolbar (Section 2.5).
Double-click an application’s program-file icon in the My Computer→Local Disk (C:)→Program Files→application folder, or highlight the application’s icon and then press Enter.
Press a key combination you’ve assigned to the program’s shortcut (Section 3.5).
Choose Start→Run, type the program file’s name in the Open text box, and then press Enter.
Let Windows launch the program for you, either at startup (Section 1.7) or at a time you’ve specified (see Task Scheduler, Section 16.6).
Open a document using any of the above techniques; its “parent” program opens automatically. For example, if you used Microsoft Word to write a file called Last Will and Testament.doc, double-clicking the document’s icon launches Word and automatically opens that file.
What happens next depends on the program you’re using (and whether or not you opened a document). Most present you with a new, blank, untitled document. Some, such as FileMaker and Microsoft PowerPoint, welcome you instead with a question: Do you want to open an existing document or create a new one? And a few oddball programs, like Adobe Photoshop, don’t open any window at all when first launched. The appearance of tool palettes is the only evidence that you’ve even opened a program.
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