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CHAPTER 3
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MANAGING THE WINDOWS DESKTOP
and a down-pointing arrowhead. When you click the button, a document list
appears, and you can click on the necessary document to jump to it. Turn
this option off and you go back to the Windows 2000 default behavior, where
“button crunch” is the normal state of being.
The other setting is to show the Quick Launch toolbar (see Figure 3.22).
The next section covers custom toolbars in depth, but the Quick Launch
toolbar was turned on by default in Windows 2000, and then turned off in
Windows XP. I find the Quick Launch toolbar to be one of the most helpful
features of the desktop and I rely on it extensively; I don’t need to sort
through multiple layers of menus on the Start Menu in order to launch a
commonly-used application. And,
because I prefer not to have my
desktop cluttered with icons, the
Quick Launch is where I put short-
cuts to my most frequently used
applications.
Customize your toolbars
Windows XP comes with a few toolbars that you may find useful. When you
first activate them, the toolbars appear on the existing taskbar; you can click
and drag them onto your existing desktop, creating separate windows. You
may also need to increase the taskbar’s size to accommodate the additional
toolbars.
To display the new toolbars, right-click the taskbar and then click
Toolbars. The menu (see Figure 3.23) shows four toolbars that you can add
to your desktop:
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Address. The Address toolbar is, next to Quick Launch, the most useful
of the bunch. It displays a dockable toolbar that lets you type in or copy
and paste a URL. This will launch your default browser and navigate to
the link. It’s very handy and saves you a click or two.
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Links. The Links toolbar shows you the contents of Internet Explorer’s
Favorites\Links folder. This is only partially useful — you may not put
all your favorites into this folder, and you may not even use Internet
Explorer as your browser.
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Desktop. This toolbar may be useful to someone, but it’s not clear
whom it’s meant for. It contains a subset of buttons that you can reach
in other and better ways. Maybe you’ll discover the use that Microsoft
thought of when they included it in Windows XP.
Figure 3.22. The Quick Launch toolbar, shown
undocked, is the perfect place to launch frequently-
used programs.
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