QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Desktop View

Each person can customize her own QuickBooks desktop. You can fulfill your every desktop desire with the preferences on the My Preferences tab—your choices don’t affect anybody else who logs into QuickBooks. On the other hand, the Company Preferences tab includes preferences that control what appears on the QuickBooks Home page (The QuickBooks Home Page).

Window Preferences

You can keep your desktop neat with only one window at a time, or you can view multiple windows:

• One Window. If you’re not good at multitasking or you simply prefer full-size windows, choose this option so that QuickBooks displays only one full-size window at a time. Although you can open multiple windows, they’re stacked on top of each other so you see only the top one. With this approach, you can switch windows by choosing windows in the Open Window List (choose View→Open Window List to display it) or on the program’s main menu bar, choose Window and then choose the name of the window you want to display.

• Multiple Windows. If you like to view several windows at a time or want to size windows based on how much information they display, as shown in Figure 23-4, choose this option. When you do, the Windows menu has commands for arranging windows such as Cascade and Tile Vertically.

Figure 23-4. The Multiple Windows option displays several windows at the same time. In this mode, you can click a window to ...