In this chapter:
Take advantage of Windows NT's everything-at-once capa-bilities. Once you know
how to switch from one window to another, you'll never get lost...
So far, we've been treating each window as though it were a television screen where
we can watch only one program at a time. But suppose we replace our tired old TV
set with a state-of-the-art, 501-channel, fully fiber-optic on-ramp to the Information
Superhighway. On the main screen, we might watch Jay Leno's monologue; but we'd use
the picture-in-picture feature to keep an eye on Dave Letterman, so we can switch
back when he gets to the Top 10 list. In fact, if we get a really hot model, we can
put CNN, The Disney Channel, and MTV on the screen all at once, although even Larry
King would have a hard time making sense of it all.
That's how Windows works when you really start to take advantage of its everything-at-once capabilities. You can shrink a window so it occupies a fraction of the screen, leaving you a clear view of the desktop--and other windows--in the background. You can stack windows up like so many "While You Were Out" message slips, and shuffle through them just as easily. If a window is in the way, you can pick it up and move it somewhere else.
It's a great way to stay on top of all the demands of a typical workday. It's an even better way to get thoroughly lost on the desktop, unless you know the secret techniques for putting the right-sized window right where you want it.
The difference between maximizing and minimizing is an all-or-nothing proposition. A window either takes up the full screen or it's stuffed into one of those buttons on the taskbar. But as you saw when you started up the WordPad and Paint programs, there is a middle ground between maximize and minimize. From either state, you can restore a program or folder to a window. As the name implies, restoring a window means putting it right back where it was before, in the exact same position and trimmed to the exact same size it was last time.
Unlike maximized applications, which hog every square inch of the screen, once a program has been restored to a window, you can resize the window or move it around. You'd pay hundreds of dollars extra to get this feature on your TV set, but it's built right into Windows.
How you restore a window depends on whether it's minimized or maximized at the moment.
If it's maximized--if you can't see anything else on the screen--look to the right of the title bar for the Restore button. It's supposed to look like two windows arranged one on top of the other, but I think it looks more like a coffeepot. Look at Figure 8.1 and judge for yourself.
Fig. 8.1
The Restore button. Click here to transform a maximized program or folder back into a window.
If WordPad isn't already open, start it up by using the Start button. Maximize the WordPad window, then push the Restore button to send it back into a window. Did you notice that the window returned to the exact size and position it was in when you started it up? Now press the Minimize button to temporarily stow WordPad on the taskbar.
Now that the WordPad window is off the main screen, there's no Restore button--but we can still make it return to a window with two swift clicks. Aim the pointer at the WordPad button on the taskbar and right-click. There, at the top of the popup menu, is the Restore command. Click it, and WordPad snaps back into its familiar window on the desktop.
TIP: This is yet another illustration of a fundamental Windows NT principle: When in doubt, right-click. You'll be amazed at the sheer number and variety of menus you'll see when you right-click seemingly random objects such as taskbar buttons, as shown in Figure 8.2, and those little icons at the right of the taskbar!
Fig. 8.2
Right-click any taskbar button to display this shortcut menu. From here, click to restore a program to a window, maximize it, or kiss it goodbye.
TIP: When it's time to close a few windows, use this popup menu to quickly get rid of the ones you no longer need. Right-click the window's taskbar button, and choose Close.
You can have hundreds of windows open simultaneously, but Windows can only focus on one window at a time. You use the mouse pointer like a spotlight to tell Windows which one you want to work with. No matter how many windows you can see on the screen, only the window you select can be in the foreground; all the rest stay in the background, waiting for their turn in the spotlight.
Windows uses the terms active and inactive to distinguish between a window in the foreground and one in the background. The term's pretty stupid when you stop to think about it, though. When you click in a window, it doesn't suddenly become active. It just sits there, waiting for you to start typing or clicking. If you want something to happen, you have to do it! Harrumph....
Anyway, there are two cues you can use to tell which window is active. First, it usually won't be covered by any other window. Second, the title bar changes color. Unless you've fiddled with your desktop colors, Windows uses a dull gray for the title bar of a background (inactive) window, and bright blue for a foreground (active) window.
Most program or folder windows look and act alike, but you'll notice a big difference when you work with a window inside another window. These document windows, found in programs like Microsoft Word for Windows and WordPerfect for Windows, are generally pretty similar to program windows, but there are a few subtle differences. When you minimize a document window, for example, it doesn't plop down on the taskbar; instead, it shrinks into a miniature box, complete with its own Restore, Maximize, and Close buttons, at the bottom of the program window.
TIP: With any window--even a window inside another window--there's an easier way to maximize and restore. You don't need to hit that tiny button at the right of the title bar. Just aim anywhere in the title bar, and double-click to switch back and forth between a window and a maximized program.
Q&A: I accidentally made a window so small I can't see the menus anymore. What do I do now?
No problem. It may not look like a window, but it still acts like one. Aim the mouse pointer at any corner of the window until it turns to a diagonal, two-headed arrow. Now click the left mouse button and drag the window's borders out until the window is a more useful size.
There are plenty of reasons why you might want to adjust the size of a window. The number one reason is so you can see another window or the desktop. Unlike our picture-in-a-picture TV, you're not limited to a single size and shape, either; you can make one of these windows tall and narrow, or short and wide. It's up to you.
Resizing a window sounds easy, but it takes a little practice. Most people have trouble the first few times they try it. The secret? You have to hit the ultra-slim border just right--you'll know you've succeeded when the pointer turns into the two-headed arrow you use to resize the window. It's not easy. If your hand trembles ever so slightly, the pointer slips and you have to start over again.
When you're aiming at a window's border, the tip of the arrow is the only part that counts. That end consists of one tiny dot, and you're trying to use that dot to hit a window border that's as thin as a piece of thread. If you're having trouble resizing windows, why not make the borders a little bigger? Right-click anywhere on the desktop, choose Properties from the popup menu, and when the Display Properties dialog box appears, click on the tab labeled Appearance. Click inside the box labeled Item, then click on the arrow at the right of the drop-down list and select the Active Window Border entry. Now click in the box labeled Size and use the up arrow to increase the setting from a measly 1 to a wider 3 or 4. Click OK and try again. There--isn't that easier?
The correct answer is "Ridiculously small." Just for fun, let's make the WordPad window as small as possible. Aim the mouse pointer at the window's lower right corner until it turns to a two-headed diagonal arrow. Now drag the window border up and to the left until there's nothing left but a title bar and a couple of buttons (see Fig. 8.3). That's pretty useless, isn't it?
Fig. 8.3
Click here, drag there. If you go too far when you're resizing a window, this is what you'll wind up with. Not very useful, is it?
Let's try the other extreme. Grab the lower right corner of our microscopic Wordpad window and drag the two-headed arrow as far as possible toward the lower right corner of the screen. Whoa! It looks almost like a maximized window, and it's nearly impossible to find the borders. This type of too-big window isn't very useful, either.
When you're working with individual windows, follow the Goldilocks principle: The perfect window is not too big, and it's not too small. What's just right? Well, the window should be just big enough to show you what you need to see inside, yet small enough to let you see the rest of the desktop and any other windows you need to work with.
Grab the lower right corner of the WordPad window (if it's truly at the edge of the screen, you may only be able to see half of the two-headed arrow) and drag to the top left until the window is a reasonable size.
CAUTION: Remember, some windows, like the Windows Calculator, are a fixed size and can't be resized.
When you click in a window to make it active, the window will always cover up anything underneath it, including the desktop and other windows. To see what's underneath, move a window out of the way by using its built-in "handle"--the title bar. It's an easy, four-step process:
Q&A: Hey! I can move the window off the screen! What's going on here?
That's perfectly normal; in fact, it's a convenient way to take a quick look at the rest of the desktop without minimizing the window you're working with. If the window moves so far off the screen that you can't get it back, here's the secret fix: Don't switch to another window. Instead, hold down the Alt key and press the spacebar. That will pull down the window's Control menu. Press the letter M (for Move), and then use the arrow keys to slide the window back toward the main screen. When you can see enough of the title bar to grab, press Enter, and move the window using the mouse.
At the end of every television program, a list of credits appears on our super-duper state-of-the-art set. If David and Jay could handle their shows with a staff of 10 or 12 people, all those credits would fit on a single screen. In Hollywood, of course, even the guy who drives the catering truck gets his name in the closing credits. They could squeeze all the names onto one screen by printing them in type so small you'd need the Hubble Space Telescope to read it. Instead, the director displays the credits on a long list that rolls up from the bottom of the screen and disappears into the top as new lines force their way up from underneath.
Windows does exactly the same thing when there are more words or numbers or icons than you can see in a window. To see all the data in a window like this involves scrolling through the window. When you scroll through a window, you move up, down, left, and right to bring the hidden contents into view.
Let's fill our WordPad window with more data than we can see at one time. Type a few words, press Enter, and repeat until you've forced a few lines off the top of the screen. As the first line disappears, you'll see a thin vertical bar appear along the right side of the window. There's an up arrow at the top of the bar, a down arrow at the bottom, and a rectangular gizmo in the middle, as shown in figure 8.4.
Plain English, please!Believe it or not, the box within the scroll bar is called a thumb, and sometimes a handle. In previous versions of Windows, the thumb was always one size; in Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95, however, the thumb becomes larger or smaller to reflect the percentage of the document you can see in the window. (A big thumb means you can see almost the entire document in the visible portion of the window; a small thumb means you'll have to do a lot of scrolling to see the entire document.) This feature is called a proportional thumb.
Fig. 8.4
When there's more in your document or folder than the window can hold, a vertical scroll bar appears along the right edge of the window. Grab the button in the middle of the scroll bar, and drag it up and down to see the window's full contents.
Imagine that the contents of the window are printed on a long piece of paper, and that you can see a portion of it through the window. The button in the middle of the scroll bar--the thumb--acts like a handle attached to the rope that pulls the piece of paper up and down, so you can see different sections of the paper. When the handle is up, you're seeing the top part of the paper. When it's down, you're seeing the bottom part.
When the scroll handle hits the top or the bottom of the scroll bar, you've gone as far as you can go. There's nothing more to see in the direction you've been scrolling.
TIP: You can move the scrolling list up and down in two other ways as well: click the arrows at the top and bottom of the scroll bar. With each click, the list will move a short distance. To move in giant steps through the window, click in the middle of the scroll bar, above or below the handle. The contents of the window will jump a full window at a time.
In most windows, the size of the scroll handle tells you how much (or how little) is hidden from view. The bigger the handle, the less there is in the rest of your window, and vice versa. If you were looking at the file that contains this book, for example--all 90,000 words of it--you could probably scroll through 900 screens before you read every word. In this case the scroll handle would be a tiny square floating in a big empty scroll bar. On the other hand, with a file that's just one line longer than your screen, you'd get a scroll bar with a jumbo-sized handle.
Scrolling a window horizontally is a little less common, but the principle is exactly the same. If the contents of your window stretch to the right or left, and your window isn't wide enough to show it all, a horizontal scroll bar will appear. Drag the handle to the left or right to pan through the entire window.
Sooner or later, despite all the resizing, reshaping, moving, and manipulating, you'll wind up with too many windows on the screen. You can't concentrate, and you can't find anything. How do you clean up the mess? That depends on what you really want to do. In every case, the secret is to point to an empty space on the taskbar and right-click. The pop-up menu that appears (see Fig. 8.5) gives you three basic options, explained in just a second.
Fig. 8.5
Use the taskbar's pop-up menu to rearrange windows with precision. Right-click any free space in the taskbar to make it appear.
Then choose Cascade from the taskbar's pop-up menu. This option stacks all the windows one on top of the other (cascades them), fanned out like a poker hand, with just enough room to see the title bar and left edge of each window beneath the active window on top. (Fig. 8.6 shows an example of several cascaded windows.)
TIP: If the Tile menu didn't produce the results you expected, don't despair. Right-click the taskbar again, and you'll see a menu choice that wasn't there before. Choose Undo Tile to put everything back the way it was, then rearrange windows and try it again.
Fig. 8.6
The Cascade option lets you fan out every open window, like a poker hand.
Then choose either of the Tile options from the taskbar's pop-up menu, and stack the open windows alongside one another. Tile Vertically resizes every open window, and lays them out edge-to-edge, side-by-side, as if you were laying tile on the kitchen floor. Tile Horizontally arranges the open windows, edge to edge, from the top to the bottom of your screen. Either way, unless you have a jumbo monitor, you're better off trying this trick with two or three windows only; any more, and every window becomes too small to use comfortably.
Fig. 8.7
The Tile option arranges two or more windows alongside one another, either horizontally (as in this example) or vertically.
Then right-click the taskbar, choose Minimize All Windows, and watch each window shrink down onto the taskbar, one after another. When the job's all done, you're back at a sparkling clean desktop, with no annoying windows.
TIP: Want a little extra room on the screen? Then "hide" the taskbar. Right-click in any empty space on the taskbar, and choose Properties from the popup menu to give yourself a little extra room on the screen. Click the tab labeled Taskbar Options, and find the box that says Auto hide. Click in the box to make a check mark appear, then click OK to close the dialog box. The taskbar disappears, giving you a little more working room. To make it reappear, just bump the mouse pointer into the bottom edge of the screen. Shazam! Up pops the taskbar.
CAUTION: Be careful you don't accidentally open two copies of the same document at the same time! With some programs and most folders, when you click the icon and the window is already open, Windows just switches you to that window. But other programs (including WordPad) let you open a new copy of the program in a new window, without warning you that another window is open. If you're not careful, you might forget that you opened your document a while ago and made some changes without saving them. If you open the same file in a new window, make some more changes, and save that file, you might accidentally overwrite the changes you made in the first one. The only cure is to keep an eye on the taskbar and watch out for duplicate windows.
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