This section of the manual describes the use of the menubar and the menus themselves. The rest of Section 4.2 ― Menus then explains each entry in every Gnumeric menu, submenu or context menu.
A menu is a graphical element within a program which appears with a list of options. For instance, almost all applications have a File menu through which the user can access the computer's filesystem to open or save their work. The main menus are on the menubar. The use of these menus is discussed in Section 4.2.1 ― The Menubar.
Gnumeric also uses context menus to give users a quick way to access certain commands. The context menu will open up right under the mouse pointer when one of the secondary mouse buttons, usually the rightmost, is clicked. This menu is called a context menu because the entries in the menu are different depending on the location of the mouse pointer. The context menus are discussed in Section 4.3 ― Context Menus.
Both the main menus, on the menubar, and context menus may have sub-menus. Sub-menus are indicated by a small right pointing arrow. To access the sub-menus, the user must move the pointer down to the sub-menu entry and carefully across to the position of the little arrow. After an instant the sub-menu will open up and the user must carefully move the pointer directly across into the sub-menu. Occasionally, when there is not enough room to the right of the currently open menu, sub-menus may open to the left. Navigating sub-menus can be difficult since the menu will close if the mouse pointer moves into any other menu entry.
Menu entries which are followed by an ellipsis (three dots) indicate that this entry will open a dialog window which will ask the user for more choices.