Tips for Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Other Applications
Creating Custom Quick Launch Shortcuts
Why It Matters To You
If your employer is like mine, there are a ton of applications that get used every day, but tend to get buried inside of Internet pages. To make these applications more accessible, add them to your Quick Launch toolbar, where you can launch them with a single click.
How to ...
This is a fairly straightforward process. By default, Windows has a default icon for any unrecognized items added to the Quick Launch toolbar, but with some basic work in Paint, you can create a custom icon for your new Quick Launch item.
- Find your favorite enterprise application. Maybe it's your ERP log in, maybe it's the T&E system or something else buried deep inside your Intranet, and lauch it.
- Often times this will open up an Internet Explorer (IE) browser window. If it doesn't, then you don't have to bother reading any further. If it does, we're in luck.
- Right-click on your browser window and select 'Create Shortcut' - this will place a shortcut on your desktop
- Drag the shortcut onto the Quick Launch area of your Task Bar
- Click on the new Quick Launch icon and say good bye to drilling through endless layers of Intranet
If you don't have or don't want a custom icon, you can stop right here. If you do, read on but I take no responsibility if the .ICO police come after you because I've listed a non standard method of creating ICO files. This is just what works for me, given limited resources and time.
- First off, Microsoft has a full article on how to create icon (.ICO) files at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997636.aspx
- Surf the Internet until you can find a nice logo. Company websites are a good place to start. When you find one, right click on the graphic and select Copy
- Paste into Paint then crop and resize until it's 64 x 64; save as a bitmap (.BMP) file
- Rename the extension .ICO
- Right-click on the new Quick Launch shortcut, select Properties, Change Icon, and then browse for the nextance.ico file in 'My Pictures. If you don't change the icon, you'll just see the regular Internet Explorer icon in your toolbar
Notes
| Last updated | 9/3/07 |
| Application Version | NA |
| Author | Michael Kan |
| Pre-requisites | None |
| Related Tips | None |