Jargon Busting: Anatomy of a window (Part 1)

All the various controls on a Windows program have names that are not always intuitive. In this post I will identify the most common controls and list the various names that they are known by. I will not bother with buttons or menus as everyone should know what they are. All the controls on this post are interactive, rather than just being images.

Text box, Text field, Text Entry, Input Box
A control into which you can type text. It can be a single line as above, or multiple lines as below.

Radio button, Option button
This control enables you to select one of a number of choices.

Check box, Tick box
These either appear singly offering an on/off or yes/no choice, or they offer a chance to select a multitude of options.

List box
This control enables you to select one or more items from a list. To select more than one item hold down the Ctrl key while clicking.

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Drop-down list
This element allows you to select an item from a list

In the next post in this series I will look at other program controls, such as sliders, spinners, trees and grids.