Austin Lane

If you are like me, there are several programs that I use on a daily basis. These range from my web browser to my email client. Normally, I would have to go to the Start menu, then All Programs, and then find the program in the list of shortcuts and folders, and then click on the shortcut to run it. Well, I have good news! There is a much easier way to access your frequently-used programs.

How do you get the Quick Launch toolbar to appear? The first thing you need to do is find a blank area on your taskbar. The taskbar is the bar that for most of us appears at the bottom of our monitors, but can appear on the top, left, right, or bottom of the screen. When you right-click, you will notice a menu appear. When this menu appears, there should be an entry on this menu entitled “Toolbars”. You should move your mouse to highlight “Toolbars”. This movement will cause another menu to open. This next menu will list all of the toolbars that can be displayed on your TaskBar. At the very bottom of my list, but it may be located in other areas for you, you should see an entry entitled “QuickLaunch”. If there is a check-mark next to it, then you already are viewing your QuickLaunch toolbar, if you do not see a check-mark, then you should left-click “QuickLaunch” and this will cause the QuickLaunch toolbar to appear.

Now that you have the QuickLaunch toolbar displayed on your taskbar, there are a few things that you can do to customize it. First of all, you are able to resize the QuickLaunch toolbar. You do this by first ensuring that the TaskBar is not locked. You do this by right-clicking the TaskBar, and ensuring that there is not a check-mark next to “Lock the TaskBar”. Once you do this, you can click and drag the line of small dots that normally appear vertically on either side of the QuickLaunch toolbar.

Now that you have resized your QuickLaunch Toolbar, there may be some programs that you want to add to your QuickLaunch toolbar. You can do this a couple of ways. The method that I use and that I will cover here is fairly straightforward and will work for most users. First, find the program whose shortcut you want to appear in your QuickLaunch Toolbar. Next, you will need to use your right mouse button and click and hold it while you drag the mouse to your QuickLaunch Toolbar. Once you get it to the toolbar, you can release your right mouse button. This will give you a couple options in a menu. I recommend that you always choose “Create Shortcuts Here”. This will add an icon to your QuickLaunch Toolbar.

You can repeat the above steps as many times as you wish and resize the QuickLaunch toolbar to show some or all of your icons. Just remember, you can start each program in your QuickLaunch Toolbar with a single left-click of your mouse.

As with any of these Tech Tips, please let me know if you have any questions, and contact Austin Lane Technologies for your technology needs.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Jeff's Tech Tip. 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.