Win7: All About the Taskbar

With Windows 7, Microsoft made the first major change to the taskbar since it first appeared in Windows 95. The standard “taskbar box” that you’re familiar with is gone, replaced by an icon of the app(s) you’re using:

win7_taskbar

You can “pin” any app you’d like to the taskbar, so it will always be available. And big part of the new taskbar is “jumplists”, where you can add documents to the taskbar icons. If you add an icon for Remote Desktop to the taskbar, for instance, all of your previous connections will be displayed when you right-click on the icon, so connecting to \\WORKSERVER is as easy as right-clicking on the icon and then left-clicking on the \\WORKSERVER entry. Likewise, if you always use the same bunch of Word documents every day, you can pin Word to the taskbar and add those documents to the jumplist, so that opening DAILY_REPORT.DOCX is only a two-click process.

While all this is pretty neat, you might wonder what has happened to the standard  Restore, Minimize, Maximize and Close features that you used to get when right-clicking on a taskbar entry. You can get those back by holding down the SHIFT button when right-clicking on the taskbar icon. What’s more, Microsoft has added several new keyboard shortcuts when right-clicking on a taskbar icon:

SHIFT + Click – Opens a new instance
CTRL + SHIFT + Click – Opens a new instance under Admin
SHIFT+ Right-Click – Shows “Restore”, “Minimize”, etc. options
CTRL + Click – Cycles between windows in the group

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.