Gene Inspector menus can be customized to help you work more efficiently

1. Choose Format ➧ Color ➧ Add Color To Menu…. This will bring up the dialog shown in Figure 27. This dialog allows you to type in a name for a color you wish to create.

   Figure 27: Add Color Dialog

2. You may choose to name colors by using the names of the colors – orange, bright green, purple, gold, etc. Another possibility is to name the colors using a descriptive name, such as “Lisa’s Text”, “Important”, or “Weak Data”. In this way, when you see a specific color used in the GI Notebook, it will tell you something about that particular text. After typing in a name, press the OK button and specify the color using the standard “color picker”.
3. Press OK to add this color to the Format ➧ Color menu. You can look to see if it has been successfully added once you have pressed OK by selecting Format ➧ Color ➧.
4. Note that in Figure 27, only the Choose color from palette button was enabled. This is because nothing was selected in the GI Notebook. If you see a color in the notebook that you want to use again, but this color is not one of the colors in the menu, select the item which has the color you want to add, and then choose Format ➧ Color ➧ Add Color To Menu….
5. As you will see in subsequent tutorials, a number of other menu items can be customized (Style Sheets, Frames, Analysis, etc.). In this tutorial we will do one more to give you a familiarity with how the customizable menus work. Choose Format ➧ Numeric Format ➧ Add Format To Menu…. You will see a dialog like the one in Figure 27. It should look familiar. Type in “two decimal places” as the name, and press OK.
6. You will now see Figure 28. This dialog allows you to define the format to be used. In this case, we want to use two decimal places. Choose the Fixed decimal notation button and type a 2 into the text field labeled Minimum decimal places. Try other items in this dialog and see how they change the sample text (circled in the figure).

   Figure 28: Numeric Format Dialog

7. Once you have configured the formatting the way you want, press OK to add it to the menu.
8. To remove a custom numeric format from the menu, choose Format ➧ Numeric Format ➧ Remove Format From Menu…. You will see the dialog shown in Figure 29. Choose the format(s) you wish to remove and press OK . Other custom menu items are removed in a similar way.

This concludes this tutorial. You may quit or continue on to the next tutorial. If you choose to continue, close all open windows now.