Windows Tips: What's on the Menu? You Decide

Add Custom Accelerator Keys to Your Start Menu

In Windows 9x you can access Start menu items by pressing Ctrl- Esc followed by the underlined character (also called the accelerator key) of the menu item you want to open. If the item has no underlined character, its accelerator key is its first character. You hit accelerator keys until the item you want is launched.

Unfortunately, if you've created two or more items that begin with the same character, or with an existing underlined character, you have to press that character repeatedly on the keyboard until the desired item is highlighted, and then press Enter. This process can really slow things down, especially if several icons start with the same character.

The obvious (if unwieldy) solution is to make sure each item you add to the Start menu (or its submenus) begins with a different character. You could also add a number (such as 1, 2, or 3) and/or a character (A, B, C, and so on) to the beginning of each icon name.

Now there's a better way. Microsoft has made available in Windows Me and 2000 a useful technique that other utilities have offered for years: Just type an ampersand (&) before any character in a shortcut or menu name to make that character the shortcut key. For example, to add a custom Control Panel menu named Controls, you can add an ampersand before a character not used as a Start menu shortcut so that the C in Controls won't conflict with the underlined c in the Search menu. Unfortunately, this feature is not fully implemented, so adding an ampersand doesn't underline the following character, it just inserts an ampersand in the middle of the menu name--for example, Contr&ols. The result may be unsightly, but the technique works.