What Is This All About?

Yesterday I wrote about the basic things you can do with the Windows Toolbar functionality in the taskbar. Today will tell you about some clever little tips and tricks that allows you to use toolbars to help you get more productive and generally make your computing life a little easie

Today will show you how you can go from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

and a lot more!

If you haven’t read the previous post you can find it here:

Tip – Advanced Windows XP Toolbars – Amaze Yourself & Your Co-workers – Part 1

and in case you don’t read it I will repeat this warning:

Loosing settings is easy

Backup needs a third party application or Windows Restore

Warning – You may inadvertently mess up your desktop settings which can be fiddly to get back the way you want it. If this concerns you set a restore point before you start – if you don’t know how click the Start button, then Help and Support type in restore point

(screenshots are included in the original post if you want to see them)

Moving and Resizing the Taskbar & Toolbars

To do some of the more advanced things you need to be able to move and resize the tasksbars and toolbars so this is how you do it.

To make the Taskbar larger move the mouse cursor to the top edge and you will see the doubleheaded arrow appear, hold the left mouse button down and drag upwards to enlarge or down to make smaller

Similarly to change the size of the toolbars within the taskbar hover the mouse over the separator until the double headed arrow appears and then drag in the desired direction:

Finally to move the taskbar or toolbar to another position you must left click in “empty space” near to the separator line (this may need a bit of trial and error) until the double headed crossed arrows appear. You can then drag and drop to a new position.

More Advanced Use of Toolbars

The next step is to create your own toolbars. You will have seen that when you select the right click context menu on the Taskbar that there are various predefined toolbars available.

To set up a new toolbar is really easy again using the Right Click context menu – select the Toolbars – New Toolbar option and this will display the New Toolbar window:

As a simple example to try out select “My Computer” and Click OK, you should then see the My computer toolbar in the taskbar, the exact position and size will depend on the setup you already have, on my PC it shows like this:

Here you can see the toolbar is displayed with the title but you can’t see anything else. The two arrow/chevrons in the top right corner indicate is more detail that is not being shown.

In the following screenshot I have resized the “My Computer” toolbar to show some of the detail but there is still more indicated by the arrow/chevrons (red pointer) . Clicking on these displays a popup of the hidden details as shown by the red box.

Really Important

The blue arrow points to a further arrowhead and this indicates that Windows Explorer has recognised there is further subfolder information. If you now click on one of these you will get a further cascading menu, like so:

Now what you can see is that I have cascaded through My Documents – Barry to FEBE 2008 03-09 00.46.26 to the contents of the FEBE…… folder. Clicking on a folder name/icon will open it in Windows Explorer and clicking on a filename/icon will open the file in the associated application or the Windows “Open With” dialog.

One other thing you should note is that you only have the cascading option in the Popup area not in the basic toolbar area. So the trick is to size your toolbar so that it only displays the title (or nothing if you have Titles turned off) so that everything cascades as so:

What More Can You Do?

The above example using “My Computer” gives you the basic principles of what you can do with toolbars.

Other things you can do are move toolbars to other edges of the scree where you can set the various options of

• Autohide
• Show Title
• Show Text

You can drag more than one toolbar to the top of the screen as shown here which you will recognise as one of the posts opening images:

However you will now understand that this screenshot is not the ideal setup as not all the folders cascade. This can easily be overcome by adding an extra toolbar which can either have nothing in it or not need to cascade. You could create a completely new folder with shortcuts to your most used applications as a sort of subset of the Quick Launch Toolbar and make that take up most of the space> Here is an example:

(This is cropped but actually extends full screen width at the top of the display.)

The My Computer and My Network Places toolbars will cascade through all the folders and subfolders giving quick access to files and folders. The My Apps toolbar gives quick access to most used applications. Further applications can be added by dragging and dropping or opening the folder in explorer and using that. There are numerous ways of changing things and an infinite number of ways you can use this.

You can have toolbars on any screen edge and you can also move the Taskbar to the top or edge of the screen, many people prefer to work with the taskbar on the edge.

Have Fun

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Tip – Advanced Windows XP Toolbars – Amaze Yourself & Your Co-workers – Part 1

Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

TIP – Create Your Own Shutdown Tools Shortcuts

TIP – Stop Applications in Windows Stealing Focus

TIP – Disable or Control Windows Error Reporting

GTD – Getting Things Done

TaskSwitchXP – So Much More Than a Task Changer

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Technorati Tags: Toolbars, Launcher, Taskbar, Free Reviews, Impartial Review, Independent Review, Portable Freeware Applications, TweakUI, Windows, Windows XP

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Hints & Tips, Windows OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.