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Defining Menu Access Keys

Menu access keys provide end users with keyboard shortcuts for selecting menu items (without using the mouse). Applications with keyboard shortcuts offer both the usability of a menu-driven interface and the efficiency of keyboard commands.

A menu access key is indicated by a special character in a menu item's label. For example, the letter S might be the menu access key for the Save menu item, and therefore appears underlined at runtime. To invoke the Save command, an end user either could use the mouse, or could press a keystroke combination such as Alt-S. (Different GUIs use different command keys to activate menu mnemonics.)

Default Menu Access Key

By default, the access key for a menu item is the first upper-case letter in the item's label. If there are no upper- case letters, the first character is the menu access key. For example, the letter "a" is the default menu access key for the following menu items:

abort sAve

User-defined Menu Access Keys

You can override the default menu access key—and explicitly create your own—by placing an ampersand (&) to the left of the desired character in the menu item's label:

&Abort Sav&e  

The ampersand will not appear at runtime, and the character you select as the menu access key can be either upper- or lower-case:

Abort Save

Note: To include a literal "&" in a menu item label, enter two consecutive ampersands (&&).