Understanding Windows Vista Context Menus

The Context Menu or right-click menu is a great way to complete some advanced tasks Windows or to access common shortcuts. You can rename files, change the sort or view mode of icons in Windows and much more. It's called the Context Menu because it changes depending on context: The menu will contain different entries depending on whether you click on an icon, the desktop, in a folder etc. Click your right mouse button and see what shows up!

Today, I am going to tell you a few things about the context menu. The context menu is sometimes called the Right Click Menu because the menu there appears when you right click on something. Here I’ve right clicked on empty space in this folder and so it gives me options relevant to the context of that folder. For example, I can change the way the items in this folder are viewed or sorted or I can create a new document here. Right clicking in a file gives me options in the files context letting me open up another program, delete or rename it or get more information about it in the Properties box. If I select more than one file, right clicking on them will give me a context menu for both., letting me perform actions on both of them together. Some of the most useful Context menu options are Cut, Copy and Paste. You can use them to Copy the files from this folder and then right click on another folder and Paste them into the folder, creating a copy there. We could have used Cut instead of Copy which would have removed the files from this folder when you Pasted them into the other folder, since we didn’t, we can remove the duplicates from this folder by right clicking on them and clicking on Delete, which will send them to the Recycle Bin. Finally, a file’s context menu has a Send To menu, which gives you more options like creating a ZIP file, making a shortcut to the file on your desktop or e-mailing the file. So that’s just a quick look at some of the many things you can do using context menus.