Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes

By Dorothy Burke and Jane Calabria

Arranging Windows on the Desktop

Windows 2000 is designed so that you can have multiple windows and multiple applications open at a time. Some applications permit you to open several windows within the application itself, such as Word where you can have several documents opened simultaneously. As you can imagine, multiple windows can make your desktop cluttered. It is important that you know how to manipulate and switch between windows.

With multiple windows open, some windows or parts of windows are inevitably hidden by others, which can make navigation confusing. Windows 2000 provides several tools to help you arrange open windows. To view the available choices for arranging multiple windows, right-click the mouse in any gray area of the taskbar.

Cascading Windows

A good way to gain control of multiple windows is to right-click a gray area of the taskbar and choose Cascade. When you choose this command, Windows lays all the open windows on top of each other so that the title bar of each is visible. Any window, which is minimized prior to cascading, will not be included in the cascade, but will remain minimized on the taskbar. Figure 6.3 shows a cascaded window arrangement using WordPad, Solitaire, and Microsoft Word. To access any window that's not on the top, simply click its title bar. That window then becomes the active window and moves to the front of the others.

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Figure 6.3 Use the cascade option to organize and navigate between open windows on your desktop.

Tip

Active Window The active window is the one in which you are working. You activate a window by clicking its title bar, anywhere inside the window, or by clicking its button on the taskbar. The active window's title bar becomes highlighted, and the active window comes to the front.

You can click and drag the title bar of any window to another location on the desktop, and you can use the mouse to resize the window borders of any open window, even when it is cascaded with other windows.

Tiling Windows

If you need to see all open windows at the same time, right-click the taskbar and choose either Tile Horizontally or Tile Vertically. When you choose to tile, Windows resizes and moves each open window so that they all appear side by side (vertically) or one on top of the other (horizontally), as shown in Figure 6.4. Note that windows that are minimized prior to tiling are not included in the tile process.

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Figure 6.4 After you've tiled or cascaded windows, you can return to your previous arrangement by right-clicking the taskbar and selecting Undo Cascade or Undo Tile.

Minimizing All Windows

You can minimize Windows by clicking the Minimize button on each open window, or you can quickly minimize all open windows using one of these two commands:

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