Windows Menus Vs the Mac Menu Bar

When switch to Mac from Windows, or needing to use both, the major differences between how the similar-looking menu bars on these two operating systems is important to understand.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the difference between menus in Windows and the Menu Bar on the Mac. 
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Now whether you've moved from Windows to Mac, or maybe you have to use both, say, one at work and one at home, a big difference is how menus work. Now this may be both something you notice all the time and something that is easy to ignore because menus do have kind of a similarity. Here's Windows 10 and I just have the simple Notepad app open. You could see there's a menu at the top and it has Files, Edit, and other menus there just like on the Mac. But the big difference is you'll notice that the menu is at the top of the window itself, not at the top of the screen. In fact, when you open up a second window with the same app, so here are two Notepad windows, you could see each has its own menu. So the menu is repeated. You could see two File and two Edit menus here. One for each window. This gives kind of the illusion that the Notepad app is actually open twice. There are two instances of it running. 
On the Mac, however, it appears that the app, in this case TextEdit, is just running once. There is only one app called TextEdit running. But the app has two windows with two separate documents open. So you could see the menus, like File and Edit here at the top of the screen, not in the windows themselves. 
Also on Windows, especially today, sometimes you just don't have a menu at all. A lot of apps today have Toolbars at the top with various buttons, with icons. Some will have, say, a single button that you click to bring up that menu out of that one button, very much like how mobile apps do it. For the Mac, for the most part, there is the consistency of having the Menu Bar always present. It is always at the top of the screen and always has the most powerful commands and functions that you need for that app. But Mac Apps also, of course, have Toolbars like you see here in TextEdit and Sidebars and other ways of interacting with them. Sometimes the functionality is even duplicated. For instance here in the Toolbar for TextEdit there are buttons for Bold, Italics, and Underline but you can also go to Format and then Font and find those same items there. 
Let's take a closer look at the Menu Bar. One of the things that you'll see in a Mac Menu Bar all the time is the Apple Menu. It is the first menu here at the top left. This menu actually doesn't change depending upon the app. So the Apple Menu is going to be the same whether you're using TextEdit, Safari, or Pages.  Here you're going to find things that have to do with your entire computer or the Operating System. So, for instance, About This Mac, you can get System Settings, you can make your Mac go to sleep or shut it down, you can Logout and so on. 
On Windows these would all be part of the Task Bar. But the Task Bar does a lot more than that and in fact a lot of the other functions of the Task Bar are what's found in the Dock on the Mac which is at the bottom. A lot of people actually mistakenly call the Dock the Task Bar because of some of the similar functionality here, like the ability to launch apps.
Another thing to notice about the Mac Menu Bar is that the second item, the first one after the Apple Menu, always has the name of the app. This allows you to know which app you're currently using. So, for instance, here I've got the Reminders App open and you could see Reminders is the name of the first item here. If I were to select a window from TextEdit you can see I've brought TextEdit to the front and now TextEdit is the app running. So Mac users know that always look here to see which app is the current active one. Then from there all of the different commands in the menu will affect that app and be specific to that app. Furthermore, it will actually affect the front-most window of that app. So, for instance, if I were to use one of these formatting commands it would have to do with this TextEdit window, not the one that is all the way in the background here. But if I bring this one to the front, now these would apply to this window, this is the active or front-most window. If you look at the menu item with the name of the app this is where you're going to find a lot of common commands no matter which app you're using. Like, for instance, the ability to Quit or Hide the current app. You also should find access to Settings for that app as well. So if I were to switch to Reminders here, now you can see this is Quit Reminders instead of Quit TextEdit and settings would apply to Reminders.
Another major difference between Windows and Mac is that when you close all of the windows of an app, I'll just close without saving these, notice that it doesn't Quit the app. TextEdit is still the app that is running here. But this allows you to Close a document and then create a new document without having to relaunch the app. So the idea that documents and the windows that contain them aren't the entire app themselves. The app can have one or more windows open or it can have zero windows open. Whereas on Microsoft Windows you're not going to get that. If you close the last window the app appears not to be running at all. The only way to get it back is to actually launch that app. 
So a couple more notes here about the Menu Bar. One is that the reason that the Menu Bar is here at the top is that it is very easy to get to it. Instead of having to position your pointer vertically to be right where you want it, you can simply just push it all the way to the top. Whether you're using a mouse or trackpad it's going to stop all the way at the top there. So vertically you don't really have to worry about getting it just right. Just go all the way to the top and then click and that will bring up the menu. 
Another thing to know is that the Menu bar isn't always there. There are some apps, particularly games, that like to go full screen that don't use the Menu Bar. This is often so that they can have their own controls built-in so that they can appear to be the same whether they are on Mac, Windows, or even consoles. But for the most part the Menu Bar is always there even if sometimes it is hidden. For instance if I were to take this document here full screen you could see the Menu Bar, by default, is hidden. But if you move your pointer all the way to the top it will drop down as well as sometimes the Toolbars and other things for the app you're using. So the Menu Bar is always there. It just may not actually be visible until you go to the top when you're using full screen mode. 
So I hope you found this look at the Mac Menu Bar useful. Thanks for watching.
Windows Menus Vs the Mac Menu Bar

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