If you often have multiple instances of
applications (e.g., several Microsoft Word
documents, several Microsoft Excel spreadsheets)
open on your
desktop, one of the
handiest Windows
features
is taskbar-button
grouping,
which was
introduced in
Windows XP.
As you probably
know, for
each instance of an application, Windows
places a button in the taskbar. The taskbar
can get crowded if you have a lot of buttons.
Instead of having virtually unreadable
taskbar buttons in multiple rows at the bottom
of the screen, you can group taskbar
buttons.
You can control whether taskbar buttons
are grouped by right-clicking the Start button,
choosing Properties from the context
menu, and selecting the Taskbar tab. As
Figure 1 shows, you select the Group similar
taskbar buttons check box to group buttons
or clear the check box to ungroup them.
When the check box is selected (which
is the default), taskbar buttons from the
same application are grouped, but you
have no control over when grouping starts
or ends. This behavior is disconcerting
because as you open and close instances of
applications, buttons spontaneously group
and ungroup, causing the buttons to shift
around. What’s worse is that when buttons
are ungrouped,
you can’t use the
Close Group option.
Although
you can use the
TweakUI tool to
tweak grouping
behavior, this tool
isn’t available for
Windows Vista.
(TweakUI is part
of the Microsoft
PowerToys for
Windows XP.)
TweakUI’s cousin—
Tweakomatic—will run on the 32-bit
edition but not the 64-bit edition of Vista.
So, if you have the 64-bit edition of Vista
or you just want to tweak grouping behavior
on your own, you can do so by creating a registry
entry named TaskbarGroupSize under
the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion Explorer\Advanced key. The TaskbarGroup-
Size entry has an effect only when the
Group similar taskbar buttons feature is
enabled.
When you set Taskbar-
GroupSize’s DWORD value
to 0, Windows will group the
buttons by age, which is the
default grouping behavior. For
example, suppose you launch
Word, Excel, then Notepad,
after which you open many
files in each application. When
the taskbar gets too crowded,
Windows will group the buttons
for the Word files first
because Word was launched
first, provided that it isn't a
Word file that's prompting the
grouping. If that's the case, the
second application launched (Excel in this example) will group first.
When you set TaskbarGroupSize’s value
to 1, Windows will group the buttons for
the application with the most windows
open first. When you set the value to any
other number, Windows will automatically
group the buttons for any application that
has at least that many windows open. So,
by setting the TaskbarGroupSize value to
2, you can force buttons to always group,
which is the behavior I prefer.
To make the registry tweak, I wrote short script named TaskbarGroupSize.vbs. You can download this script by clicking the Download the Code Here button at the top of the page.
When you run the script by simply
double-clicking it, it returns the current
value for TaskbarGroupSize. If that entry
hasn’t been created, it returns the value
undefined, as Figure 2 shows. When you
launch the script from the command line
and provide a numeric argument, it sets
TaskbarGroupSize to that value for you.