Add A Shortcut To Your Windows Vista Quick Launch Bar

One of the handiest sections of your Windows Vista taskbar is that tiny little area just to the right of your Start menu button, the Quick Launch Bar. This nifty area allows for you to store any number of shortcuts to any files and programs you so desire. What’s so unique about the Quick Launch Bar however, is the fact that it displays shortcuts as cute little icons of the programs you have assigned there; Which makes it much more efficient on space and helps reduce clutter.

You will sometimes find that a lot of modern programs will give you the choice of whether or not you would like to add a shortcut to your Quick Launch Bar during installation. However, in order for us to manually insert additional shortcuts into the Quick Launch Bar, we will to find the file we want; It can be virtually any file or program you want located within any area of you computer, including: Windows Media Player and QuickTime video clips, Wordpad documents, shortcuts to your favourite video games, virtually any file you can think of!

For the purpose of this tutorial, I will add a shortcut to a program I find myself using a heck of a lot nowadays, Corel Paint Shop Pro XI. Once you locate the file you want, please select it.

This is the main Paint Shop Pro XI executable (.exe) file and will mean that once I add this shortcut to the Quick Launch Bar, I can click it and Paint Shop Pro XI will launch immediately after; Minimum fuss. To apply the Paint Shop Pro XI file - or whichever file you chose - simply click and drag the file to your Windows Vista Quick Launch Bar like so:

This will update my old Quick Launch Bar, which contained shortcuts to my: Show Desktop, My Files folder, a Notepad document, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.

And I will be presented with a brand spanking new shortcut to my ever-faithful, Paint Shop Pro XI graphics manipulation program. Hurrah!

You may however notice that by adding the link to Paint Shop Pro XI, I have lost the link to Internet Explorer 7. Well, it hasn’t actually been lost, but merely pushed aside into the Quick Link Bar drop-down selection menu. If you would prefer to be able to display more file shortcuts within the Quick Launch Bar, all you need to do is drag and drop the small seperator graphic across your Windows Vista taskbar in order to specify just how much room you want to provide for your Quick Launch Bar.

As you can no doubt tell by this final screenshot, I have widened the Quick Launch Bar so much so that I can now see every single shortcut that I have stored there; Including several that were previously hidden within the drop-down selection menu.

Update: For those of you whom are curious as what additional shortcuts I have assigned to my Quick Launch Bar, they are: Windows Vista Flip 3D, Age of Mythology and Age of Mythology: The Titans Expansion Pack video games, Windows Media Player and QuickTime Player.