How To Enable And Customise The Quick Launch Toolbar

Quick Launch is a small toolbar that sits next to your Start Button and provides a quick method of starting your most used applications. It saves you having to go through the Start menu every time you want to open up Word for example, with Quick Launch you can create an icon for Word, whenever you want to open Word, click the icon and away you go. It's not that dissimilar to putting a shortcut on your desktop except that desktop icons get covered over with application windows, the Quick Launch toolbar doesn't.

By default the toolbar isn't available, you need to choose to use it before being able to configure it. The following should help explain what you need to do to enable it and how to add a program to it.

  • To enable the toolbar, single right click on any blank part of the taskbar. A small menu will appear. Choose the 'Toolbars' option at the top, then single left click on the 'Quick Launch' words.

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  • You will now see the toolbar appear next to the Start button. By default it will show a shortcut to 'Internet Explorer', 'Quicktime' and 'Show the desktop'

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  • To make the toolbar bigger so that it will display more than three program, you need to unlock the taskbar. To do this, again, single right click a blank part of the taskbar to display to small menu, this time single left click on the 'Lock the Taskbar' option.

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  • You should now see that to the right of the Quick Launch toolbar there is a vertical light grey bar.

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  • You need to hover over this bar (carefully) until the cursor turns into a double ended arrow cursor (hard to describe and even harder to obtain a picture of :) ). When it does change, you can press down the left mouse button and hold it down and drag the bar to the right. You will see it move and more Quick Launch icons appearing. Releasing the mouse button finishes the bar movement.

  • To add programs to the toolbar, you can simply drag them from either the desktop or the Start Menu the same way as you create a shortcut on the desktop

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  • As you drag a shortcut into the toolbar, a thick black vertical will appear showing you where your new icon will be placed. Releasing the mouse button will create the icon.

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Note: Quick Launch settings do not get propagated if folder redirection is used.