Windows 7 Features Your Clients Will Need on Day One

Whether your clients took the Vista plunge or they're making do with XP, Microsoft’s newest operating system is probably in their future (and yours), and it probably should be given its significant user interface improvements and myriad new features.

In this article, we’ll show you some of the major features of the Windows 7 interface. You might want to use this information to start educating your clients about the possibilities that exist with Windows 7.

Windows 7 Taskbar
The Taskbar gets a makeover Windows 7, making more efficient and easier to use. For The Taskbar can hold a lot more; buttons that represent open programs are now square instead of rectangular, and they display only icons, not the name of the program or the open file.

Taskbar buttons also save space by combining multiple windows for an application. Opening two Word documents or a pair of Explorer windows, for example, at the same time results in a single taskbar button instead of two. Buttons that represent multiple windows will appear “stacked."

How do you tell what’s behind those unlabeled Taskbar buttons that are stacked on top of each other? Placing the cursor over an open program’s Taskbar button reveals a large preview thumbnail along with the program and file name.

If the Taskbar button represents two, three, or four windows, you’ll see side-by-side previews for each window. If you place your cursor over a preview thumbnail (without clicking it) it will immediately bring that window to the forefront of the desktop, turning all others windows into transparent outlines for easier viewing. (Microsoft calls this feature Aero Peek.)

Users often relied on the Quick Launch toolbar to run programs conveniently from the Taskbar in the previous versions of Windows. But in Windows 7 the Taskbar can launch programs directly. There are three default buttons on the Taskbar (for Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and Windows Media Player), but you can easily add your own favorite programs to it as well by dragging-and-dropping a program icon on to the Taskbar — or right-click it and choose Pin to Taskbar — to create a Taskbar button.

Users who have a Taskbar filled with buttons can drag them around to rearrange them into whatever order you want. Once they’ve found an order you like, press the Windows key + a number key to quickly launch a program or switch to an application via its Taskbar button. (For example, by default Windows + 1 will open/switch to Internet Explorer.)

Jump Lists
Jump Lists, which are available either from the Taskbar or from the Start menu, provide an easy path to a program’s recently used files.

Users that right-click on a Taskbar button (it doesn’t matter whether the application is open or not) will see the program’s Jump List: a list of the program’s recently opened files (or in the case of Internet Explorer, frequently visited Web sites). Users can make an item always appear in the Jump List by pinning it there—just highlight the item and click on the adjacent pin icon. To access a Jump List from the Start menu, hover the mouse over an item with a right-facing arrow next to it.

In some cases, a Jump List may also include links to a program’s common tasks. From IE’s Jump List, for example, you can open a new tab or turn on Private Browsing. Programs must be Windows 7-aware to offer Jump Lists, however, so some may require an update.

Manipulate Windows with a Shake and a Snap
There are several handy new ways to manipulate program windows in Windows 7. Earlier I mentioned Aero Peek, which focuses attention on a specific window while relegating the others to transparent outlines. You can also use Aero Peek to make all open windows transparent. This lets you see through to the desktop underneath — just put the mouse over the thin box at the right edge of the Taskbar. To minimize all open windows, click on the same box.

Aero Shake is another way to hone in on a particular window on a cluttered desktop. To use it, users simply click and hold the top of a window and shake the mouse up and down or left to right; all other windows but that one will minimize. Just shake again to restore the minimized windows.

Aero Snap offers a convenient way to resize or maximize windows. First, click and drag a window to the top edge of the screen to maximize it. To view, for example, a document and spreadsheet side by side, drag their respective windows to opposite edges (left and right) of the desktop — they’ll each be resized to take up precisely half the screen.

You can also maximize a window vertically, which is helpful for long text documents or Web page windows, by aligning the cursor with the top edge of a window until it turns into a two-way vertical arrow and then double-clicking.

Goodbye System Tray, Hello Notification Area
On the typical Windows Vista or XP systems, the notification area (also referred to as the system tray) can quickly becomes a morass of a dozen or more icons. The Windows 7 notification area restores order by automatically suppressing most of the applications attempt to install icons there. By default Windows 7 shows only three or four notification area icons—volume, network, Action Center (more on that in a moment) and, on battery-powered systems, power management.

To the left of the notification area icons sits an up-pointing arrowhead. If you click it you’ll see a group of icons hidden by Windows 7. If you’d rather have an icon visible, drag it down to notification area. Conversely, you can hide icons that are already visible by dragging them upward.

Windows 7 Action Center
Besides clutter, the other common notification area problem is that its icons are constantly vying for your attention with a steady stream of message balloons that frequently provide information that’s not important, or at least not immediately so.

The Windows 7 Action Center consolidates the notification-area messages so they’re not constantly popping up to distract you. You can left-click on the Action Center’s flag icon to view security and maintenance-related messages (with special emphasis on critical issues like anti-virus software that’s out of date), and click on a message to address it.

This article originally appeared on Internet.com's SmallBusinessComputing Web site.