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What we do is look at our tech support call logs. If your goal is for your
documentation to minimize calls, you base what you do on how your customers are
actually reading and interpreting docs and not on what "major vendors" and other
companies' style guides say. Not even on what you think your customers should
need.
I agree that an "Open" menu item or button doesn't need or deserve an ellipsis.
But as for including the ellipsis in the manual, I recommend that you and Tony
do as I suggested: Look at the menus in practically any popular software program
from a major vendor, and you'll see many commands that use (properly, in most
cases) ellipses to indicate that they open a dialog box for additional user
input. Now look at the manual or online help for those programs. I bet you'll be
hard-pressed to find examples that include the ellipses.
For the reasons I and others have mentioned, the docs should simply use the
button or menu item names, and not extraneous matter like ellipses, keyboard
shortcuts, or ending punctuation.
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