Windows 2000 Pro: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Windows, Folders, and the Taskbar

Windows got its name from the rectangles on the screen—the windows—in which every computer activity takes place. You look at a Web page in a window, type short stories in a window, read email in a window, and look at the contents of a folder in a window—sometimes all at once.

This overlapping-windows scheme makes using a computer much easier than windowless operating systems like DOS. But it has a downside of its own, as any Windows veteran can tell you: As you create more files, stash them in more folders, and launch more programs, it’s easy to wind up paralyzed before a screen awash with cluttered, overlapping rectangles.

Fortunately, Windows is crawling with icons, buttons, and other inventions to help you keep these windows under control.

Windows in Windows

There are two categories of windows in Windows: desktop windows (which open when you double-click a disk or folder icon) and application windows (which appear when you’re working on a document or in a program, such as Word or Internet Explorer). Nonetheless, all of these windows have certain components in common. Figure 4-1 shows a representative example: the window that appears when you double-click the My Documents icon on your desktop.

• Title bar. This top strip displays the name of the window. It’s also the “handle” that you drag when you want to move the window on the screen.

• Minimize button. Click this button to temporarily hide a window; it shrinks down into the form of a button on your Taskbar (see Section 4.3). (You can open it again by clicking that icon.) Keyboard shortcut: Press Alt+Space bar, then N.

• Maximize button. Click this button to enlarge the window so that it fills the screen. (Keyboard shortcut: Press Alt+Space bar, then X.) At this point, the Maximize button turns into a Restore button (whose icon shows two overlapping rectangles), which you can click to return the window to its previous size.

  Tip

  You can also maximize a window by double-clicking its title bar. Double-clicking the title bar on a maximized window returns it to its previous size.

• Close button. Click the X to close the window. Keyboard shortcut: Press Alt+F4; or press Alt+Space bar, then C.

• Menu bar. Click one of these words (such as File or Edit) to open a menu, which shows a list of commands available in this window.

• Toolbar. Some windows have these special strips that hold one-click shortcut buttons, which are equivalents for menu commands Microsoft thinks you’ll use frequently. (More on toolbars at the end of this chapter.)

• Scroll bar. A scroll bar appears if the window isn’t large enough to show all its contents, as described in the sidebar box on the next page.

• Address bar. This bar lets you type in a Web address, or even the address of a folder on your PC; when you press Enter, that Web page or a list of the contents of the folder appears on the screen. (This bar shows up in desktop windows and Web browsers, not in application windows. See Section 11.3.1 for details.)

• Control icon. The icon next to the title is actually a menu that offers commands for sizing, moving, and closing the window. You can double-click it to close a window; otherwise, it’s not very useful, because its commands duplicate the other doodads described here.

• Borders. You can change the size of a window by dragging these borders. Position your pointer over any border until the pointer turns into a double-headed arrow. Then drag inward or outward to reshape the window. (To resize a full-screen window, click the Restore button first.)

  Tip

  If you drag the corner of a window, you can resize it in both dimensions at once. The diagonally striped ribs of the lower-right corner may suggest that that’s the only corner you can drag, but it’s not; all four corners work the same way.

• Explorer bar. This special left-side-of-the-window panel shows information about the window, or about whatever icon you click.

  But using the View→Explorer Bar command, you can fill this half of the window with your choice of several other kinds of information: the Search pane described on Section 3.6, your list of Favorite icons and Web sites, the History list (folders you’ve opened recently), or Folders (the Windows Explorer-like folder tree described on Section 5.1.1). You can even choose Tip of the Day (to see a helpful Windows trick at the bottom of the window) or, if you’re online, Discuss (to open a chat window).

Figure 4-1. All windows have the same basic ingredients, making it easy to become an expert in window manipulation. This figure shows a desktop window—a disk or folder; but you’ll encounter the same elements in application windows.

UP TO SPEED : Scroll-Bar Crash Course

Scroll bars are the strips at the right side and bottom of a window. Some windows have both, some have only one, and a few have none. The scroll bar signals you that the window isn’t big enough to show you all of its contents.

Click the arrows at each end of a scroll bar to move slowly through the window, or drag the square handle (called the thumb) to move faster. (The position of the thumb relative to the entire scroll bar reflects your relative position in the entire window or document.) You can quickly move to a specific part of the window by holding the mouse button down on the scroll bar where you want the thumb to be. The scroll bar rapidly scrolls to the desired location and then stops.

If you have a mouse that’s equipped with a wheel, such as the Microsoft IntelliMouse, you can scroll (in most programs) just by turning the wheel with your finger, even if your cursor is nowhere near the scroll bar. You can also scroll by clicking the wheel inside the window to create an origin mark in the scroll bar, and then moving the mouse (without clicking) upward or downward. The farther you move the mouse away from the origin mark, the faster the window scrolls. Click the wheel again to leave AutoScroll mode.

Finally, you can scroll without using the mouse at all. Press the Page Up or Page Down keys to scroll the window by one window-full, or use the up- and down-arrow keys to scroll one line at a time. Ctrl+Home brings you to the top of the window; Ctrl+End to the bottom.

Sizing, Moving, and Closing Windows

It’s easy enough to resize and reposition your desktop windows—an especially useful feature when more than one are open.

Sizing a window

Every Windows window falls into one of these three categories:

• Maximized means that the window fills the screen; its edges are glued to the boundaries of your monitor, and you can’t see anything behind it. It gets that way when you click its Maximize button. This is a great condition for your window when you’re surfing the Web or working on a document for hours at a stretch, because the largest possible window means the least possible scrolling.

Tip

When a window is maximized, you can restore it (as described below) by pressing Alt+Space bar, then R.

• When you click a window’s Minimize button (Figure 4-1), the window disappears from sight. It hasn’t actually closed, however; it’s simply reincarnated as a button on the Taskbar strip at the bottom of the screen. You can bring the window back by clicking this Taskbar button, which bears the window’s name. Minimizing a window is a great tactic when you want to see what’s in the window behind it.

• A restored window is neither maximized nor minimized; it’s a loose cannon, floating around on your screen as an independent rectangle. Because its edges aren’t attached to the walls of your monitor like a maximized window, you can make it any size you like by dragging its borders.

Tip

Double-clicking the title bar makes a window alternate between its maximized (full-screen) and restored conditions.

Moving a window

Moving a window is easy—just drag the title bar.

Most of the time, you move a window to get it out of the way when you’re trying to see what’s behind it. However, moving windows around is also handy if you’re moving or copying data between programs, or moving or copying files between drives or folders, as shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-2. Creating two restored (free-floating) windows is a convenient preparation for copying information between them. Make both windows small and put them side-by-side, scroll if necessary, and then drag some high-lighted material from one into the other. This works either with icons in desktop windows (top) or text in applications like Microsoft Word (bottom). If you press Ctrl as you drag text in this way, you make a copy of the original passage instead of moving it.

Closing a window

You can close a window in any of several ways:

• Click the Close button (the X in the upper-right corner of the window).

• Click the icon in the upper-left corner, and then choose Close from the drop-down menu.

• Press Alt+F4.

• Right-click the window’s Taskbar button (see Section 4.3), and then choose Close from the shortcut menu.

• In application windows, choose File→Exit.

• In desktop windows, choose File→Close.

When you close a document window in one of your programs, no matter which action you use, you’re given an opportunity to save your work before the window closes. Be careful, too—in many programs, including Internet Explorer, closing the window also quits the program entirely.

Working with Multiple Windows

Many people routinely keep four or five programs open at once—a calendar, word processor, Web browser, and email program, for example. Others (such as computer book authors) regularly work in just one program, but have several document windows open at once (representing several chapters, for example). Learning how to manage and navigate among a flurry of overlapping windows is an essential Windows survival skill.

Active and inactive windows

When you have multiple windows open on your screen, only one window is active, which means that:

• It’s in the foreground, in front of all other windows.

• It’s the window that reacts to your keystrokes and mouse clicks.

The title bar of the active window is blue; the background (inactive) window title bars are gray. (You can change this color scheme, as described in Section 8.6.3.)

Just because a window is in the background, by the way, doesn’t mean that it can’t continue with whatever assignment you gave it. For example, when your word processor is printing a document, your email program may be collecting mail, or your Web browser can be loading a Web page. If a background program needs to pass a message up to you (such as an error message), it automatically pops to the foreground, becoming the active program. When you respond to the message (usually by clicking OK), Windows sends the program back to the background and returns you to the window you were using before the message appeared.

Manipulating Windows with the Taskbar

The Taskbar (Figure 4-3) can be a helpful assistant when you’re working with multiple windows. It provides one-click window-manipulation commands. As you can see in Figure 4-3, it’s not always easy to find a particular window.

• To bring a window to the foreground, making it the active window, click its button on the Taskbar.

• To minimize, maximize, restore, or close a window, even if you can’t see it on the screen, right-click its button on the Taskbar and choose the appropriate command from the shortcut menu (Figure 4-3, bottom).

• To arrange all open windows in an overlapping pattern (except those you’ve minimized), as shown in Figure 4-4, right-click a blank spot on the Taskbar and choose Cascade Windows from the shortcut menu.

  Figure 4-4. Cascading windows are neatly arranged so you can see the title bar for each window. Click any title bar to bring that window to the foreground as the active window. After you’ve clicked a few title bars and worked in several windows, you’ll have to choose the Cascade Windows command again to rearrange all your open windows.

• To arrange all nonminimized windows in neat little boxes, each getting an equal rectangular chunk of your screen, right-click a blank spot on the Taskbar and choose Tile Vertically or Tile Horizontally from the shortcut menu.

• To minimize all the windows in one fell swoop, right-click a blank spot on the Taskbar and choose Minimize All Windows from the shortcut menu.

  If you change your mind, the Taskbar shortcut menu always includes an Undo command for the last Taskbar command you invoked. (Its wording changes to reflect your most recent action—Undo Minimize All, for example.)

Figure 4-3. There’s a word processor buried in this morass, and without the Taskbar buttons at the bottom edge, it would take a lot of blind clicks to find it and make it the active window. Sometimes you need to bring a particular window into the foreground in a big hurry, especially if the boss arrives when you’re playing Solitaire.

Tip

There’s no command or keystroke to close all windows at once.

There is, however, a trick to closing multiple desktop windows: While pressing the Shift key, click the X in the upper-right corner of the last window you opened. Doing so doesn’t close all open desktop windows, but it closes all the ones that sprang from a single “parent” disk or folder. For example, if you opened My Computer, then your C: drive, then your Program Files folder, the Shift trick closes all those windows. But if you had also opened the My Documents folder on the desktop, it stays open, because it wasn’t part of the My Computer→C: drive→Program Files series.

Configuring Desktop Windows

Windows windows look just fine as they come from the factory; all the edges are straight, and the text is perfectly legible. Still, if you’re going to stare at this computer screen for half of your waking hours, you may as well investigate some of the ways these windows can be enhanced for better looks and greater efficiency. As it turns out, there’s no end to the tweaks Microsoft lets you perform.

Icon and List Views

You can view the files and folders in a desktop window in any of several ways: as small icons, as jumbo icons, as a tidy list, and so on. Each window remembers its view settings independently.

To change this view setting for a particular open window, choose one of these commands from its View menu: Large Icons, Small Icons, List, Details, or Thumbnails. (Figure 4-5 illustrates each of these options.)

Figure 4-5. The five ways you can view the contents of a folder window. In Large Icons view (top), a large icon, with its label beneath, represents each file or folder. This is the default view. In Small Icons view (middle left, shown without its left-side panel), a small icon (label to the right) represents each file or folder; the icons are arranged in rows. (The alphabetical progression goes from left to right, rather than top to bottom.) The List view is similar, except the contents are arranged in columns (middle right). Details view (lower left) is the same as List view, except that you get additional columns of information that reveal the size, icon type, and the date and time the object was last modified. (This view, a familiar one to Macintosh fans, is growing in popularity.) Finally, in Thumbnails view (lower right), each icon is enclosed in a tiny picture frame. Graphics files are actually shown in the frame, so this view is really only useful for windows that contain graphics files. (Thumbnails view is not available in the My Computer window).

Changing the sorting order

Windows starts out arranging the icons alphabetically, with folders in one A-to-Z group and the list of loose files in a second group. To change the sorting criterion, choose View→Arrange Icons, and then select one of these options:

• By Name arranges the icons alphabetically by name.

• By Type arranges the files in the window alphabetically by file type, such as Word documents, applications, JPEG files, and so on.

  Tip

  The file type is determined by the file’s filename extension (see Section 7.6), but selecting this option sorts the files by the name assigned to the type. For example, the extension .psd denotes Adobe Photoshop documents, but Windows sorts these files under A (for Adobe), not P (for PSD).

• By Size arranges the files in the window by size, starting with the smallest file. (Folders are unaffected; Windows never shows you the sizes of folders.)

• By Date sorts the files in the window by creation date (not modified date), starting with the oldest file.

• Auto Arrange, which is available only in icon views, isn’t actually a sorting method; it’s a straightening-up method. It rearranges the icons so they’re equally spaced and neat. (You can use this command on the desktop, too, which is one way toavoid Cluttered Windows Desktop Syndrome.)

Note

You can’t reverse the sort order of your icons (from Z to A, for example) except in Details view, described next.

Manipulating the Details view

The Details view provides some unique characteristics that make it more powerful than the other views. First, there’s the obvious advantage of being able to see the size and date of the objects in neat columns, as shown in Figure 4-5. Second, you can sort the contents by file size, type, or date simply by clicking the appropriate column heading.

Tip

If you click the same column heading again, the sorting order is reversed. For instance, clicking the Modified column once places your files into oldest-files-first sequence; a second click arranges the files with the newest file first. A small arrow appears on the column heading that points up or down to indicate the order of the sort.

Finally, you can add more columns to the window—up to 28 columns of information about each icon. Start by choosing View→Choose Columns to open the Column Settings dialog box shown in Figure 4-6. Click the checkboxes to turn the columns on or off. To rearrange the sequence of columns, click the name of a checked column and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons. The top-to-bottom list in the dialog box becomes the left-to-right display in the window.

Figure 4-6. The range of information you can display about objects in the window is robust enough to satisfy even the terminally curious. Some of the characteristics listed here are for specific types of files; you won’t need a column for Audio Format, for example, in a folder that holds word-processing documents.

Tip

You can change the width of a column by editing the number at the bottom of the Column Settings window (Figure 4-6). But that’s much too unnatural. Instead, position your cursor on the vertical line between column headings in a Details-view window. When the pointer turns into a double-headed arrow, drag the vertical line horizontally.

Web View vs. Classic View

When you first run Windows, desktop windows show up with many visual attributes of a Web page, as shown in Figure 4-7.

Figure 4-7. Opening My Documents reveals a graphical display of contents and a Web-like layout, including underlined links, an address bar, and Back/Forward buttons on the toolbar. There’s even a background graphic like the ones that sometimes lurk as the backdrops of Web pages. This background adds nothing to the features of the window, but it may satisfy some artistic yearning in you.

The classic view, on the other hand, simply displays the contents of the folder, omitting the graphics on the left side of the Web-type window and packing a lot more info into your window. (Figure 4-8 shows this view.) Switching to the classic view is a system-wide alteration, affecting all desktop windows. To accomplish this change, open any folder window, and then:

1. Choose Tools → Folder Options.

   The Folder Options dialog box appears.

2. Turn on “Use Windows classic folders,” and then click OK.

Figure 4-8. Microsoft dubs this the “classic” view, meaning the way folders looked before the Web-type display was built into desktop windows. That should mean that folder windows look like “out-of-the box” Windows 95 or Windows NT 4 windows. However, a “classic” window is actually a melding of the classic Windows design and the newer Web style; it can still incorporate an address bar and Back/Forward buttons.

Now your windows look more like Figure 4-8, which shows the same folder that appears in Figure 4-7.

Tip

After you’ve tweaked your system windows into a perfectly beautiful and efficient configuration, you don’t have to go through all of that work for each folder. Windows can make all your changes the new default for all your desktop windows.

Choose Tools→Folder Options→View tab. Click the Like Current Folder button. Windows asks if you’re sure you know what you’re doing. Click Yes.

The Four Window Toolbars

On the day it’s born, a desktop window has two toolbars across the top (see Figure 4-9). (That doesn’t include the strip that says File, Edit, View, and so on. That’s not a toolbar; it’s the menu bar.)

Figure 4-9. Top: The four basic toolbars that you can summon independently for any desktop window. Bottom: By dragging the vertical left-side handle of a toolbar, you can make the displays more compact by placing two or more bars on the same row. You can even drag one directly up into the menu bar, as shown here, saving even more vertical space.

But by choosing View→Toolbars, or right-clicking a blank spot on a toolbar and choosing toolbar names from the shortcut menu, you can add or hide whichever toolbars you like, on a window-by-window basis. There are four toolbars from which to choose, called the Standard Buttons, Address Bar, Links, and Radio toolbars. (Only the first two appear when you first open a window in Windows.)

The Standard Buttons toolbar

If you think the Standard Buttons toolbar looks suspiciously like a toolbar from a Web browser, you’re right. Microsoft redesigned this toolbar to reflect the growing emphasis in Windows toward erasing the differences between your desktop and the Internet. It starts out with these buttons:

• Back, Forward. These buttons resemble those in a Web browser that let you return to Web pages you’ve just seen. This time, however, they show you the contents of a disk or folder you’ve just seen. If you’re using one-window-at-a-time mode (see "Uni-window vs. Multi-Window" in the next section), these buttons are your sole means of getting around as you burrow through your folders.

  POWER USERS’ CLINIC : Customizing and Decorating Web-Style Windows

  As you may have noticed, the Web-style desktop windows in Windows look a bit like Web pages, complete with a colorful graphic and links at the left side (see Figure 4-8). Using a special wizard, you can change the look of this left-side window portion. You can change the picture that appears here, the color of the background or the icon labels, the message that appears that describes the folder contents, and so on. (No, this feature is nothing to write home about, but some lucky Microsoft intern worked very hard on it.)

  To get started, choose View→Customize This Folder from any desktop window (except the My Computer window). When the wizard appears, click Next. The wizard offers to help you do any of the following tasks:

  • Choose a different HTML template for the window. This option, for people who know the HTML Web-programming language, lets you specify the font, color, size, and other characteristics of the design of the left-side pane. If you click “I want to edit this template,” the wizard will open the actual HTML code in the Notepad (see Section 9.10), where you can go to town changing its look.

  • Choose a new background color for the window, as well as a contrasting color for the text inside it.

  • Add a comment (to explain what the folder is for and what’s in it).

  After you use the wizard to customize your Web-based windows, the next time you launch the wizard, you’ll be offered a new option: Remove Customizations. The wizard lists the customizations you’ve made, and you can remove one or all of them.

• Up. Click this button to move up one level in the folder hierarchy. For example, if you’re viewing your My Pictures folder, clicking this button opens the My Documents folder that contains it.

• Search. Opens the Search panel described on Section 3.6.

  GEM IN THE ROUGH : Eliminating Double-Clicks

  If you like the Web-like window display shown in Figure 4-7, you can take the Web paradigm a step further so that one click, not two, opens an icon.

  To accomplish this setup, choose Tools→Folder Options. Select “Single-click to open an item” on the General tab to enable single-clicks to open folders and files. Then turn the icon names into links by selecting “Underline all icon titles” or “Underline an icon title when I point to it.”

  If a single click opens an icon, you’re entitled to wonder: Then how does one select an icon (which you’d normally do with a single click)? Answer: Just point to it, letting the mouse hover over the icon without clicking. To make multiple selections, press the Ctrl key as you point to additional icons.

  If you’re an experienced Windows user, this option will probably feel extremely unnatural. (Microsoft made this behavior the standard setting in prototype versions of Windows 98. The public’s response to it was overwhelmingly negative; it’s been an optional feature ever since.)

• Folders. Hides or shows the master map of disks and folders at the left side of the window, simulating the two-panel Windows Explorer navigational display described in the next chapter.

• History. Opens a new panel at the left side of the window that shows every Web site and network computer you’ve visited recently.

• Move To, Copy To. These buttons are available only when you’ve highlighted an icon or icons in a folder or disk window. Clicking the Move To or Copy To button summons a “Browse for Folder” window that lets you choose a different folder or disk on your computer. If you then click OK, you move or copy the highlighted icon or icons to the specified location.

• Delete. Gives the highlighted icon or icons a fast trip into the Recycle Bin. (The icon may not disappear until you close and reopen the window you were looking at.)

• Undo. Takes back the last thing you did, such as clicking the Move To, Copy To, or Delete button.

• Views. Opens a short menu listing the five basic ways a window can display its icon contents—as large icons, small icons, and so on. (You can also use the View menu on the menu bar for the same purpose.) For details on these views, see Section 4.2.

These are just the buttons that Microsoft proposes; you’re free to add any of several other buttons to the toolbar, or get rid of ones you never use. To begin the customizing process, choose View→Toolbars→Customize to open the dialog box shown in Figure 4-10.

Figure 4-10.  Select a button from the list at left; click Add to add it to the toolbar. Click Delete to remove a button from the list at right. To reorganize the toolbar, select a button and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons. You can also add separators to creates groups of buttons in the same toolbar. Any changes you make to this toolbar affect all windows.

Tip

Setting all folders to the same view or resetting all folders to their default views doesn’t reset the Standard Buttons toolbar. To return a modified toolbar to its original state, you must open the dialog box shown in Figure 4-10 and click the Reset button.

The Address bar toolbar

The Address Bar toolbar (Figure 4-9) may look like the white strip at the top of your Web browser, where you type the URL (Web address) of a Web site you want to visit. But the Address Bar accepts more than Web addresses. After all, Web addresses are just locations of particular files on particular computers, so it’s not much of a stretch to see how it lets you open any file on your machine or any files on your network (that you have permission to see) by typing its address here.

You can type any of the following information into the Address Bar text box:

• A Web address. Skip the http:// part. Just type the body of the Web address, such as http://www.microsoft.com, in this box. When you click Go or press Enter, the actual web page you selected will appear in the window.

• A search phrase. If you type some text into this strip that isn’t obviously a Web address, Windows assumes that you’re telling it, “Go onto the Internet and search for this phrase.” From here, it works exactly as though you’ve used the Internet search feature described in Chapter 3.

• A folder name. You can also type one of several important folder names into this strip, such as My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, My Pictures, and so on. When you click Go or press Enter, you open that folder window.

• A program or path name. Type in the path to a folder or file on your own computer or on your network. For a file or folder on your own machine, you specify the drive letter and folder name. On the network, you’ll need the UNC name (page 32 Section ), which looks something like \\server_name\foldername\subfolder.

In each case, as soon as you begin to type, a pop-up list of recently visited Web sites, files, or folders appears below the Address bar. Windows is trying to save you some typing. If you see what you’re looking for, click it with the mouse, or press the down arrow key to highlight the one you want and then press Enter.

The Links toolbar

This toolbar offers buttons representing your favorite Web sites—the ones you the added to your Favorites→Links folder in Internet Explorer (see Section 11.3.2).

The Radio toolbar

The Radio toolbar came into existence with Internet Explorer 5. It’s an odd tool, but great fun, because it lets you use your Internet connection to listen to radio stations locally or internationally. (For starters, try Radio Pogoda, an oldies station in Warsaw. Radio Bleue from Tahiti has its weird charms, as well. To program the Radio toolbar, see Section 9.3.4.9. )

Uni-Window vs. Multi-Window

When you double-click a folder, Windows can react in one of two ways:

• It can open a new window. Now you’ve got two windows on the screen, one overlapping the other. Moving or copying an icon from one into the other is a piece of cake, as shown in Figure 4-2. Trouble is, if your double-clicking craze continues much longer, your screen will eventually be overrun with windows, which you must now painstakingly close again.

• It can replace the original window with a new one. This only-one-window-at-all-times behavior (the default) keeps your desktop from becoming crowded with windows. If you need to return to the previous window, the Back button takes you there. Of course, you’ll have to use a different method to move or copy icons from one folder to another using this method, because you can’t drag and drop.

Which system you adopt is a matter of preference and experience. Whatever you decide, here’s how you tell Windows which behavior you’d like:

1. Choose Tools → Folder Options in any desktop window.

   It doesn’t matter what window you start in; the change you’re about to make affects every window. The Folder Options dialog box appears.

2. On the General tab, click “Open each folder in the same window” or “Open each folder in its own window,” as suits your fancy, and then click OK.

Tip

You can override these choices on a case-by-case basis by pressing Shift as you open a folder. Doing so reverses the status of the chosen setting described in step 2 above.

The Folder Options Options

If you choose Tools→Folder Options from any folder window, and then click the View tab (see Figure 4-11), you see an array of options that affect all of the folder windows on your PC. When assessing the impact of these controls, earth-shattering isn’t the adjective that springs to mind; still, you may find one or two of them useful:

• Display compressed files and folders with alternate color. As described on Section 19.3.2, Windows 2000 lets you compress certain files and folders to conserve disk space. This option makes their icons change color, so you’ll know at a glance which have been compressed.

• Display the full path in the address bar. When this option is on, Windows shows the exact location of the current window in the Address bar (if it’s showing)—for example, C:\Documents and Settings\Sharon\My Documents\Outlines. Seeing the path can be useful when you’re not sure which disk a folder is on, for example.

• Display the full path in the title bar. Same idea, but this time the path of the open folder or file shows up in the title bar of the window.

• Hidden files and folders; Hide protected operating system files. Windows hides certain files and information that, if deleted or changed by mistake, could damage the operating system and cause you hours of troubleshooting grief. Yes, Big Brother is watching you, but he means well. (See Section 10.1.3 for details on this feature.) You’ll have the smoothest computing career if you leave these options untouched.

• Hide file extensions for known file types. Windows normally hides the three-letter filename extension on standard kinds of files and documents (Word files, Excel files, and so on), in an effort to make Windows seem less technical and intimidating. If you prefer, however, you can make these extensions reappear by turning this option off; see Section 10.1.3 for more on this topic.

• Launch folder windows in a separate process. Use this last-resort feature only if you have programs that refuse to play nicely with one another. That is, whenever they’re open, your system locks up, slows down, or displays other peculiar behavior. Using this option keeps each program in its own memory space, eliminating conflicts.

• Remember each folder’s view settings. This checkbox makes every folder window open using whatever view it showed last (Details, Large Icons, or whatever).

  You might assume, then, that removing the checkmark would make every folder open with some standard default view, regardless of the last view you used. But for some reason known only to its diabolic creators, clearing this checkbox produces a much more complicated scheme:

  The first folder you open (in the My Computer or Windows Explorer window) appears in the view it used most recently—the saved view. Any additional folders you open also appear using this view.

  If you change the view of the first window—from Large Icons to Details, for example—you’ve just changed the saved view. Subsequent folders you open also inherit Details view, and when you reopen Windows Explorer or My Computer, Details view will prevail.

  But if you switch the second folder you open (or a later one) to Details view, you affect the default window view only during this folder-opening session. When you next reopen Windows Explorer or My Computer, you’ll be back in Large Icons view. In other words, when you change views determines whether the View setting “sticks” for future openings of Windows Explorer or My Computer.

• Show My Documents on the Desktop. You’re not allowed to throw away the My Documents desktop icon, but you can make it disappear by turning off this checkbox.

• Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items. If you point to (but don’t click) an icon, a Taskbar button, and so on, you get a tooltip: a floating yellow label that helps identify what you’re pointing to. If you find these Tooltips distracting, turn off this checkbox.

Figure 4-11. Use the list in this dialog box to choose what you want to see and how you want to see it. Don’t make important system files visible unless you’re confident that you’d never accidentally delete them during a cleaning frenzy.

Note

The changes you make in the Folder Options settings are global; they affect all desktop windows.

The Taskbar

Windows 2000 is a multitasking operating system, which in English means that you can run multiple programs at the same time; the computer divides its processing power among them. This makes it easy to work on a letter or spreadsheet while an email program is open and operating, or while downloading a file from the Internet. However, when multiple windows or programs are open, they start to overlap and hide each other, sometimes making it difficult to find the window you want. The Taskbar alleviates this problem (Figure 4-12) by representing all currently open programs or windows as labeled buttons.

Figure 4-12. The Taskbar is usually divided into three chunks, according to its three functions. To identify an icon, point without clicking to view an identifying tooltip.

The Taskbar has several important functions:

• It shows you what’s happening. The right end of the Taskbar—the Tray—contains little status icons that show you the time, whether or not you’re online, whether or not your laptop’s plugged in, and so on.

• It lists every open window and program. Each time you launch an application or open a desktop window, a new button appears on the Taskbar. A single click makes that window pop to the front—a terrific tool in your fight against window clutter.

• It gives you quick access to buried functions. The left end of the Taskbar—the Quick Launch toolbar—lists the icons of programs, folders, disks, and files you use a lot.

This section covers each of these features in turn.

System Tray

The System Tray is the small area on the far right side of the Taskbar where you see the current time, a speaker icon, and other icons. Windows 2000 and various small programs maintain unobtrusive status displays here, or icons whose shortcut menus can configure the system or a program. Here are some of the icons you may find:

• The current time, which, when double-clicked, opens to display the Date/Time control panel programs.

  Tip

  If you point to the time and wait a moment without clicking, a pop-up balloon appears that tells you the day of the week and today’s date.

• Click the speaker icon to summon a slider that you can use to adjust the volume of your speakers. Double-click the icon to open a dialog box that controls speaker balance and the volume level for all sound devices.

• A display icon, which you can use to change the resolution of your screen.

• A battery meter icon, which shows how much battery power your laptop has left.

• A network icon (two overlapping monitors), which appears while you’re connected to the Internet.

• A printer icon, which appears while you’re printing something.

• A fax icon, which appears while you’re sending or getting a fax.

In addition, instant messaging, music players, and other programs may place their own icons in the System Tray.

Tip

Some computer manufacturers preinstall icons in the Tray, most of which you’ll rarely use. Unfortunately, you may have to hunt for their Off switches. Sometimes you can right-click the icon to open a configuration dialog box; sometimes you may have to configure the options of the responsible application itself; and sometimes you may have to remove a shortcut to the application from your Start→ Programs→Startup folder, as described in Chapter 3.

Window Buttons

The Taskbar buttons make it easy to switch between open programs and windows; just click one to bring its associated window into the foreground, even if it had been minimized (see page 60).

Some programs, such as Microsoft Word, also display the name of the document you’re working on. However, the button is almost always too small to show the full document name. The solution: Use the cursor to point to the button without clicking. A tooltip pops up to identify the full name of the document.

You can also manipulate windows directly from the Taskbar button. Right-click the button to see the Control menu, which offers Minimize, Maximize, Close, and other useful window-control functions. It’s a real time-saver to close a window without having to first bring it into the foreground.

The Quick Launch Toolbar

The left end of the Taskbar shows little icons that represent files, programs, and Windows you open frequently (see Figure 4-12); one click does the trick. For details on this toolbar and the others in Windows, see Section 4.4.1.

Customizing the Taskbar

You’re not stuck with the Taskbar as it came from Microsoft. You can resize it, move it, or hide it completely.

Moving the Taskbar

You can move the Taskbar to the top of your monitor, or, if you’re a true rebel, to either side. To do so, just drag it there, using any blank spot in the central section as a handle. Release the mouse when you see a red line appear near the edge.

When the Taskbar is on the left or right edge of the screen, Windows widens it automatically. That’s because the Taskbar buttons are horizontal; if you’re expected to read their names, you need the added width.

Tip

No matter which edge of the screen holds your Taskbar, most applications adjust their own windows to make sure the Taskbar is visible. In other words, your Word document will shift sideways so that it doesn’t overlap the Taskbar you’ve dragged to the side of the screen.

Resizing the Taskbar

When the Taskbar accumulates a lot of buttons and icons, you may want to enlarge it so you can see what’s what. Here’s how to adjust its size:

1. Position your pointer on the inside edge of the taskbar.

   That is, use the edge that’s closest to the desktop.

2. When the pointer turns into a double-headed arrow, drag the edge of the Taskbar in the appropriate direction.

   Drag it toward the desktop to enlarge the Taskbar, or toward the edge of your monitor to make it smaller.

Note

If you’re resizing a Taskbar that’s on the top or bottom of the screen, the Taskbar automatically changes its size in increments of its original size. You can’t fine-tune the height; you can only double or triple it, for example. If it’s on the left or right edge of your screen, however, you can resize the Taskbar freely.

Setting Taskbar Properties

You can further adjust the Taskbar’s behavior in some interesting ways; for example, you can make it invisible until you request it. To do so, choose Start→Settings→Taskbar and Start Menu. (Or right-click a blank spot on the Taskbar, and then choose Properties from the shortcut menu.)

The Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box appears, offering these options:

• Always on top. This option makes sure that no other window can cover up the Taskbar. Your programs automatically shrink their own windows as necessary to accommodate the screen bulk of the Taskbar. (If you deselect this option, full-screen application windows don’t make room for the Taskbar; they overlap it.)

  You may find it useful to turn this option off when you need extra screen space, such as when you’re running games and graphics programs. Some people like the additional lines they gain in a word processing window, or the additional Web-page space they can see in a Web browser.

  Tip

  To open the Taskbar when it’s not visible, just press Ctrl+Esc, or press the Windows-logo key on your keyboard.

• Auto hide. This feature makes the Taskbar disappear whenever you’re not using it. This is a clever way to give your entire screen to application windows, and yet have the Taskbar at your cursor-tip when you need it.

  When Auto hide is enabled, the Taskbar disappears when you click anywhere else, or when your cursor has moved a short distance from the Taskbar. You can see a thin line along the edge of your screen, which represents the edge of the Taskbar.As soon as your pointer moves close to that black line, the Taskbar reappears. (This feature can be inconvenient when one of your programs comes complete with its own toolbar or status bar at the bottom of the screen; you may keep inadvertently activating the Taskbar instead of the application control you need.)

  GEM IN THE ROUGH : The Taskbar Shortcut Menu

  The Taskbar has its own, very useful shortcut menu, which you can summon by right-clicking any blank spot on the Taskbar. It offers several commands for organizing swarms of open windows (see "Manipulating Windows with the Taskbar" on Section 4.1.3), as well as a Toolbars command that lets you show and hide the four Windows Taskbar toolbars. (See Section 4.2.3 for more on these toolbars.)

  Furthermore, in some applications, you’ll see additional commands on the Taskbar button shortcut menu. For example, the Taskbar button shortcut menu for Eudora offers a command to check for new email.

• Show clock. The “Show clock” option shows or hides the current time from the Taskbar Tray.

Hiding the Taskbar manually

You may occasionally want to dedicate all your desktop space to an application window. Perhaps you’re designing a complicated set of graphics, or you need to see more rows in a spreadsheet. In these situations, you can hide the Taskbar like this:

1. Position your mouse pointer on the inside edge of the Taskbar.

   When you reach the right spot, the pointer turns into a double-headed arrow.

2. Drag the Taskbar edge toward the edge of the monitor.

   When the Taskbar disappears, you can see a thin line representing the hidden edge. To bring the Taskbar back, move your mouse toward this line until the usual cursor turns into a double-headed arrow, then drag the Taskbar back onto the screen.

Taskbar Toolbars

Windows offers four canned Taskbar toolbars: separate, recessed-looking areas on the Taskbar containing special-function features (see Figure 4-13). You can add icons to any toolbar, and you can also create your own toolbars (see the next section).

Figure 4-13. Toolbars eat into your Taskbar space; use them sparingly. If you’ve added too many icons to the toolbar, an arrow appears at its right end. Click it to expose a list of the commands or icons that didn’t fit.

To make these toolbars appear or disappear, right-click a blank spot on the Taskbar and choose from the list of toolbars that appears. The ones with checkmarks are the ones you’re seeing now; choose one with a checkmark to make the toolbar disappear.

Quick Launch Toolbar

For sheer convenience, the Quick Launch toolbar puts the Start menu to shame. Maybe that’s why it’s the only toolbar that appears on your Taskbar automatically. It contains icons for functions that Microsoft assumes you’ll use most often:

• Show Desktop, a one-click way to minimize (hide) the windows on your screen to make your desktop visible. Don’t forget about this button the next time you need to burrow through some folders, put something in the Recycle Bin, or perform some other activity in your desktop folders. Keyboard shortcut: Windows key+D.

• Launch Internet Explorer, for one-click access to the Web browser included with Windows.

• Launch Outlook Express, for one-click access to the email program included with Windows (see Chapter 12).

But you should consider those buttons only hints of this toolbar’s power. What makes it great is how easy it is to add your own icons, those you use frequently. There’s no faster or easier way to get them open, no matter what you’re doing on your PC—the Taskbar is always visible and showing your favorite icons.

To add an icon there, simply drag it from whatever desktop window it’s in (or from the Start menu, or even the desktop itself) onto the Quick Launch toolbar area, as shown in Figure 4-14. To remove an icon, right-click it and choose Delete from the shortcut menu. (You’re removing only its image from the Quick Launch toolbar; you’re not actually removing any software from your computer.) If you don’t use Outlook Express for email, for example, remove it from the Quick Launch toolbar.

Figure 4-14. You can add almost any kind of icon to the Quick Launch toolbar (an application, document file, disk, folder, control panel, or whatever) just by dragging it there (top); the thick vertical bar shows you where it’ll appear. The only challenge is to find the window that houses the icon you want to add. If it’s an application, see Section 3.10.2.2 for hints on finding the actual icon of the program in question.

Desktop Toolbar

The Desktop toolbar (Figure 4-13) is a row of icons representing the icons sitting on your desktop: My Computer, My Documents, and so on. This toolbar can make yourTaskbar very crowded. You can ease the crowding by right-clicking the toolbar and deselecting Show Text. Naturally, this creates a new problem—without the text all the icons may not be easily identifiable.

Consider avoiding this space-hungry toolbar. Instead, when you need to access one of the icons on your desktop, click the Show Desktop icon on the Quick Launch toolbar.

Address Toolbar, Links Toolbar

These toolbars are exactly the same as the window toolbars described on Section 4.2.3.2. Those toolbars, however, appear only in the windows in which you’ve summoned them; these appear on the Taskbar at all times.

Redesigning Your Toolbars

To change the look of a toolbar, right-click a blank spot on that toolbar to display its shortcut menu. The shortcut menu offers these choices, depending on the toolbar:

• View lets you change the size of the icons on the toolbar.

• Show Text identifies each toolbar icon with a text label.

• Refresh redraws the Links or Desktop toolbar if it needs updating. For example, suppose you drag an icon onto your desktop. The Desktop toolbar doesn’t change to list the new icon—until you use this Refresh command.

• Open works only with the Quick Launch and Links toolbars. It opens a window that lists what’s in the toolbar, so that you can delete or rename the icons conveniently. (Of course, you can also delete or rename something on these toolbars by right-clicking an icon and choosing Delete or Rename from the shortcut menu. But using the Open command can be useful when you’re performing extensive changes to the toolbar; it opens a window, where the icons are larger and you have more working room.)

• Show Title makes the toolbar’s name (such as “Quick Launch” or “Desktop”) appear on the toolbar.

Tip

You can enlarge an individual toolbar by placing your mouse pointer on either edge of the toolbar. When the pointer changes to a double-headed arrow, drag to the right to make the toolbar wider. (Doing so may make the other toolbars smaller, however.)

Moving toolbars

You don’t have to keep toolbars at the bottom of the screen; you can move them anywhere on your screen you find handy, as shown in Figure 4-15. To return a toolbar to its original location, drag its title bar back onto the Taskbar.

Figure 4-15. Top: To park a toolbar in a different location, drag upward on the ridge at the left edge. Bottom: What you get is a strange sort of floating toolbar; it’s now an on-screen, perpetually available launcher. (Use Tooltips, or choose Show Text from its shortcut menu, to identify the icons.) If you drag the toolbar to an edge of the screen, it becomes glued there like a second Taskbar.

The disadvantage to moving a toolbar off the Taskbar is that you’re using screen real estate that might be better used by your document windows. In addition, any windows you open cover the on-screen toolbar, rendering it useless. Of course, you can minimize all the windows to get to the toolbar, but that seems more like work than convenience.

Creating toolbars

The Quick Launch area of the Taskbar is such a delight that you might wish you could create several different Quick Launch toolbars, each stocked with the icons for a different project or person. One could contain icons for all the chapters of a book you’re writing; another could list only your games.

Fortunately, Microsoft has anticipated your craving. It’s easy to create as many different custom toolbars as you like, each of which behaves exactly like the Quick Launch toolbar.

Windows creates toolbars from folders; so the first step is to fill a folder with the icons (or shortcuts) that you’ll want to add to the custom toolbar. Just drag this folder’s icon onto the Taskbar; when you release the mouse, it instantly becomes a toolbar of its own.

Feel free to tailor it as described in the previous discussions—by changing its icon sizes, hiding or showing the icon labels, or adding new icons to it by dragging them from other desktop windows.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION : The Not-So-Amazing Disappearing Toolbar

I made a custom toolbar, and actually spent quite a lot of time on it. And then, when I needed more space on my Taskbar, I right-clicked it and chose Close from shortcut menu.

And now I want it back. But when I right-click a blank area on the Taskbar and choose Toolbars, my custom toolbar isn’t listed there! How do I get it back?

You’ve discovered an unfortunate little quirk of custom toolbars: They don’t really exist. All you’ve done is added a folder listing to your Taskbar, as fleeting as the morning dew. If you close a custom toolbar, it’s gone forever.

The folder from which you created it, however, is still hanging around. If you want your toolbar back, just drag the corresponding folder back to the Taskbar.