Title Bar
 

Understanding how to read the title bar is a basic skill in Windows. The Title Bar is indicated by the red circle in the illustration at left. The Icon (at far left) gives you a clue as to what program the window belongs to. In this case, the Icon shows that the window belongs to Microsoft Paint.

To the right of the title bar, you’ll see some text. The first bit of text is the name of the file that is currently open in this program. Since we’ve just launched Paint, we see a new (blank) document, which is named "untitled" by default. The next bit of text tells us again that this window is a Paint window, just like the Icon did. It’s redundant, but redundancy is common to the Windows interface.

At the right side of the tool bar, you’ll see three buttons: From left to right, they are: Minimize, Maximize/Restore, and Close. If you click on Minimize, the window will shrink down and disappear, leaving only the window tab on the task bar (usually located the very bottom of the screen) to let you know that the window is still open. Click tab to bring the window back to its previous size. Maximize/Restore will switch the window between taking up the full size of the screen and some smaller portion of it. When Restored, you can re-size the window by clicking along the edge of the window and dragging it to the desired size. You can also move the window about by clicking and holding the Title Bar and dragging the mouse around. When Maximized, the window takes up the entire screen and can’t be moved around or re-sized. Clicking on the Close button will shut the program down completely.