Robin Williams Mac OS X Book, Jaguar Edition, The

Ellipses in the Menus

Often you will see an ellipsis (the three dots, ...) after a menu command such as “Open...” or “Save As....” The ellipsis indicates that you will get a dialog box, as shown below, when you choose that command. If there is no ellipsis, that command will activate as soon as you select it.

There are different varieties of dialog boxes, such as alert boxes, message boxes, or edit boxes, plus dialog “sheets” that drop down from the title bar, but basically they all are meant to communicate with you before they activate a command.

Dialog boxes almost always give you an option to Cancel, so it is quite safe to explore menu commands that have ellipses: Just choose a command that is followed by an ellipsis, check out the dialog ...