Add the Quick Launch toolbar to Windows 7
One of the downsides of the Windows 7 Superbar is that it doesn’t have a quick launch toolbar. Now ordinarily this wouldn’t really matter because the actual taskbar itself acts like one big quick launch toolbar. This is fine when you use the large icons on the taskbar, but the large gaps between the pinned programs on the taskbar put some users off using the old vista-styletaskbar. However, this can be fixed by using a quick launch toolbar that you can easily make yourself, which has almost no gap between shortcuts placed on it.
There are a few quick and easy steps to make your own quick launch toolbar that is both compact and easy to customize.
- Make a folder somewhere on your computer that you will use as your quick launch folder which will hold all your shortcuts to the programs you want to have on the toolbar. It doesn’t matter where it is or what it’s called, just as long as you can remember where you put it.
- Create shortcuts to the programs you want to have on the toolbar and put them into the folder you made as your quick launch folder. An easy way to do this is to just hold down shift and right click on one of your pinned programs (this won’t work if the program has windows open) and click “Send to” -> “Desktop (create shortcut)”, then just copying the newly created shortcut into the folder.
- Once you have all the shortcuts in the folder, right click the taskbar and uncheck “Lock the taskbar”.
4. Right click the taskbar again, and this time under “Toolbars” click “New toolbar…”. Find the folder you made and put all the shortcuts into and click it, then click “Select folder”. You should now have a little piece of text on the taskbar that says the name of the folder you made.
5. Right click the folder’s text on the taskbar, and then uncheck the options “Show Text” and “Show title”.
6. Move your mouse over the folder’s place holder (dotted line to the left of the toolbar) and click and drag the text over to the left hand side of the taskbar.
7. Click the placeholder to the left of the pinned programs on the taskbar, and drag it back to wherever you want to resize the quick launch bar.
8. If you haven’t already, change your taskbar back to the old vista-style to enjoy the new toolbar as much as possible. If you don’t yet know how to do this, check out our other tutorial on “How to Change Windows 7 “Superbar” Back to Vista Taskbar” which can be found at
9. You should now be able to unpin all the programs from the taskbar and enjoy the compact quick launch bar that you have made yourself.
