The bottom of the screen isn’t necessarily the ideal location for the taskbar. Virtually all screens are wider than they are tall, so the taskbar eats into your limited vertical screen space. You have three ways out: Hide the taskbar, shrink it, or rotate it 90 degrees.
To turn on the taskbar’s auto-hiding feature, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar; choose Properties. The dialog box offers “Auto-hide the taskbar,” which makes the taskbar disappear whenever you’re not using it—a clever way to devote your entire screen to application windows and yet have the taskbar at your cursor tip when needed.
When this feature is turned on, the taskbar disappears whenever you click elsewhere, or whenever your cursor moves away from it. Only a thin line at the edge of the screen indicates that you have a taskbar at all. As soon as your pointer moves close to that line, the taskbar joyfully springs back into view.
Even with the button-grouping feature, the taskbar can still accumulate a lot of buttons and icons.
As a result, you may want to enlarge the taskbar to see what’s what:
The draggy way. First, ensure that the toolbar isn’t locked (which means you can’t move or resize it). Right-click a blank spot on the taskbar; from the shortcut menu, uncheck “Lock the taskbar,” if necessary.
Now position your pointer on the upper edge of the taskbar (or, if you’ve moved the taskbar, whichever edge is closest to the center of the screen). When the pointer turns into a double-headed arrow, drag to make the taskbar thicker or thinner.
NOSTALGIA CORNER: Bringing Back the Old Taskbar
The taskbar’s tendency to consolidate the names of document windows into a single program button saves space, for sure.
Even so, it’s not inconceivable that you might prefer the old system, in which there’s one taskbar button for every single window. For example, the new consolidated-window scheme means you can’t bring a certain application to the front just by clicking its taskbar button. (You must actually choose one particular window from among its thumbnails, which is a lot more effort.)
To make Windows display the taskbar the old way, right-click an empty area of the taskbar and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. From the “Taskbar buttons” pop-up menu, choose either “Never combine” or “Combine when taskbar is full” (meaning “only as necessary”). Click Apply; you now have the wider, text-labeled taskbar buttons from the pre-Win7 days, as shown here.
While you’re rooting around in here, consider also turning on “Use small taskbar buttons.” That step replaces the inch-tall, unlabeled, Mac-style taskbar icons with smaller, half-height ones. Click OK.
The only weirdness now: Icons representing programs that aren’t open—icons you’ve pinned to the taskbar for quick access—appear only as icons, without labels, and the effect is somewhat disturbing. You can get rid of them, if you want; just right-click each and choose “Unpin this program from taskbar.”
Now you have a taskbar that looks almost exactly like the Windows XP taskbar—except that it still has a rectangular, plain, modern look. Without add-on shareware, that’s as far back into the past as you’re allowed to rewind Windows; the Classic theme, if you even remember it, is gone from Windows 8.
Note
If you’re resizing a taskbar that’s on the top or bottom of the screen, it automatically changes its size in full taskbar-height increments. 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. If you’re not careful, you can make it look really weird.
The dialog-box way. In the Properties dialog box for the taskbar (right-click it; choose Properties from the shortcut menu), an option called “Use small taskbar buttons” appears. It cuts those inch-tall taskbar icons down to half size, for a more pre-Win7 look.
Yet another approach to getting the taskbar out of your way is to rotate it so that it sits vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways:
The draggy way. First, ensure that the toolbar isn’t locked, as described above. (Right-click a blank spot; from the shortcut menu, uncheck “Lock the taskbar.”)
Now you can drag the taskbar to any edge of the screen, using any blank spot in the central section as a handle. (You can even drag it to the top of your screen, if you’re a true rebel.) Release the mouse when the taskbar leaps to the edge you’ve indicated with the cursor.
The dialog-box way. Right-click a blank spot on the taskbar; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Use the “Taskbar location on screen” pop-up menu to choose Left, Right, Top, or Bottom. (You can do this even if the taskbar is locked.)
You’ll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Most programs put their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where the taskbar and its labels might get in the way.
Note
When you position your taskbar vertically, what was once the right side of the taskbar becomes the bottom. In other words, the clock appears at the bottom of the vertical taskbar. So as you read references to the taskbar in this book, mentally substitute the phrase “bottom part of the taskbar” when you read references to the “right side of the taskbar.”