Understanding the Menus

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Whereas scrolling allows you to move around within a document, menus allow you to move between screens. You learned in Lesson 2, "Using the SAP R/3 Interface," that the menu bar is the line just below the title bar in the SAP R/3 screen. The following three menus exist on every screen for your convenience:

System ”

This menu gives you access to system functions.
Help ”

SAP R/3 makes plenty of clearly written Help screens available online. Lessons 5, "Using Basic Help," and 6, "Using Task-Level Help," cover basic and advanced online help.
Options ”

It's easy to miss the user options menu, which is marked only by a colored logo at the far right of the menu bar. This menu controls your user ID and is covered in more detail in Lesson 19, "Customizing Your User ID."

Figure 4.5 shows each menu and the commands they contain.

Figure 4.5. These menus are always accessible.

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Time or Response time

The fourth option on the Options menu is either Time or Response time. By selecting this option, you can toggle the time display at the bottom-right corner of your screen.

SAP R/3 provides several other menus. As you may have noticed, however, the other menus in the menu bar change according to the task you're performing. Those menus include the following:

Object ”

This is usually named after the kind of document you are creating. In this case, it's the Requisition menu.
Edit ”

This has commands for things you can do to the current object (such as Copy, Paste, or Select).
Goto ”

Several screens are usually associated with each object. The Goto menu gives you one way to move between those related screens. In addition, commands on this menu are often duplicated on the screen buttons , which gives you two ways to get there.
Extras ”

Sometimes an object's main screen contains all the commonly used fields, while less commonly used fields appear on different screens. The Details menu takes you to these screens.
Environment ”

This menu allows you to work with other data associated with the current object.
View ”

This menu allows you to select one of several views of your data.

Figure 4.6 shows each open menu. Take a good look at which commands are located on which menus. The submenus will also vary with the task you are doing.

Figure 4.6. These menus change from screen to screen.

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Grayed Selections

A grayed option isn't currently available. For example, you can't save a record if there's no data in it, so the Save option might be shadowed .

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You Have Different Options?

Like most everything about SAP, the menus can be configured so that any company can add custom functions to any menu. Some companies add specialized menus for custom software they have built.

In this lesson, you learned how to move from screen to screen and how to use screen buttons, scrollbars, and multilevel lists. In the next lesson, you learn how to use the extensive Help facilities that SAP R/3 provides.

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