I call them Luddites because they want to revert to the old Vista ways of individual documents in the taskbar rather than embracing the new look and feel of the Windows 7, but hey, it’s a free country at least as far as the Windows 7 taskbar is concerned. For instance, I prefer Small Icons, while Luddites like ‘Mad’ Mick choose the ‘Taskbar button’ option, which allows them to ‘Never Combine’ documents with their parent program. Returning to the taskbar, the secret of success is to fine tune the icons behavior thus right-click the taskbar and select ‘Properties’. Incidentally, one reason why the new taskbar behavior does not give me any problems is that I still use Alt + Tab to check my open files (See screenshot above right). As for Jump List, if you click on any non-glowing icon in the taskbar you get a ‘Jump List’ with a ‘Recent’ or ‘Frequent’ menu showing you the last files that you used. Thus when you find one of your old favorite programs, just right-click its executable and choose ‘Pin to taskbar’.

To get the most out of the new Windows 7 taskbar embrace the concepts of: ‘Pin to ….’ and ‘Jump List’. As usual Microsoft provides at least 3 ways of doing everything, and as usual, it’s easy, satisfying and fun to learn about these new features simply by exploring on your own. To get the most from this new way of working embrace the Winkey +Tab technique, and use Flip 3-D to cycle through a preview of each open program. If you hover over a program icon which has open files then you can see a preview, this is designed to save time when searching for one of your many open documents. When you click on the this icon up comes a Jump List confirming that there are indeed 3 Microsoft Word files in use, in this example: Tips, Shopping now and Finance. Furthermore, you can just about make out 3 shadows to the right of the Word icon.

Observe in the screenshot below how the Word for Windows icon appears to be glowing, this is because the taskbar is trying to tell us that this program has open files. Windows 7’s new taskbar philosophy is based around the program icon, it helps to think of any individual documents as being combined with that main icon. Some people hanker for the control of manual gear selection, while others accept the efficiency of automatic changes.

Perhaps the change is like switching from a car with a shift change gearbox to an automatic. The word radical maybe a bit strong, but the Windows 7 taskbar clearly exhibits different behaviour when accessing programs compared with Vista or XP.

How to Return to the Vista Quick Launch Technology.

It also introduces a new way of working some say it’s better and quicker, other like ‘Mad’ Mike say it’s more restrictive, and prefer the taskbar in Vista. Compared to Vista, the Windows 7 Taskbar brings a different look and feel to handling programs.

Windows 7 mouse jumping around screen