When to use ellipsis after menu items

Question

In pretty much all applications that have a menu bar, some of the items have an ellipsis (...) after them, and some don\'t. Is there a well known convention on when to put t

Answer 1

This is a very tricky question indeed. At first had it might seem obvious but there are many actions that fall between the categories. It is interesting to see that Microsoft themselves violate this practice.

Example from Vista In Computer Management menu File - Options... has ellipsis In Computer Management / Users and Groups / Users. Right-click a user. The New user... action has ellipsis but Rename does not although it requires extra actions to actually rename the account. In Micrsoft SQL Server Management Studio menu File - Print has Properties... button with Ellipsis.

This is just after 5 minutes of investigating. There are plenty more examples.

You can argue for both conventions for both these actions. You can't actually change any properties or options without doing some extra actions in the dialog that is displayed which assumes that ellipsis should be used. However you might just be interested in viewing what options or properties that are defined and that would assume that no ellipsis is used. Microsoft also acknowledge that there are instances when there is ambiguity

"In case of ambiguity (for example, the command label lacks a verb), decide based on the most likely user action. If simply viewing the window is a common action, don't use an ellipsis." However based on this it would make more sense to have ellipsis for Options and Properties as it is probably more likely that you want to change a property that just view it.