Access the Windows Desktop without minimizing anything

In the first tip, we showed you how to get to the Windows Desktop by hovering over or clicking on the new transparent zone in the lower-right corner of the screen—a.k.a., the Aero Peek feature. But perhaps you access your Windows Desktop constantly, or it contains lots of nested folders that are home to your everyday working files. You can get fast-click access to them from the taskbar without minimizing all your windows and losing your place.

You’ll have to set this up, though. Right-click on the taskbar, and choose Properties, to launch the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog. Under the Toolbars tab, check off the Desktop button.

Hit OK, and a mini-menu called “Desktop” appears in the taskbar, followed by two angle brackets (>>). Click it, and you’ll see all of the items on your Windows Desktop, complete with nesting folders. Now it’s easy to access anything on your Windows Desktop without having to navigate back to it. Especially useful: The Computer entry in this menu lets you browse your PC’s entire drive-and-folder hierarchy from here (including any networked drives).

Open DOCX files without installing a converter (or Office 2007)

Unless you’ve updated your PC to Microsoft Office 2007 or Word 2007 (by no means a given, since earlier versions of Microsoft’s suite still work well for many folks), you might be confounded on occasion if you’re presented with a file with the DOCX extension. (DOCX is the native word-processing file format that the latest version of Word uses.)

Rather than fussing with and installing Microsoft’s Compatibility Packs, you can use Windows 7’s version of WordPad to open DOCX. To track down WordPad (it’s a bit buried, as usual), from the Start menu, go to All Programs > Accessories > WordPad. Once you're in WordPad, you can simply use the Open command to open a DOCX file:

This is a handy solution if you only encounter DOCX files once in a while. WordPad has semi-adopted the ribbon interface of the latest Office, so it might take some getting used to, but you should be able to save your DOCX document into a more amenable file format (including the earlier DOC format for Word files) without too much trouble. Most of the formatting should be maintained. (Puzzlingly, Windows 7 WordPad seems to be less competent at opening “original” DOC files, losing the formatting and peppering the files with header gibberish, in our tests. Hmmm.)

See full-size previews of open windows via taskbar thumbnails

If you’re a Windows Vista veteran, you’re familiar with the taskbar thumbnails feature—hover over an item in the taskbar, and you see a miniature version of that program’s window. (Sometimes the thumbnail is even live-animated, for example if you’re looking at a video window.) In Windows 7, these thumbnail previews are still around, but the new OS takes the preview a big step further, letting you see a full-size preview of the window without “committing” and clicking on it to make it active. That way, you can quickly check info on a buried-but-open window and immediately revert to the window you currently have active. In the sample picture below, we're hovering over the taskbar thumbnail and seeing a preview of the Internet Explorer page circled:

Though it’s easy, it’s not immediately apparent how to do this. Hover your cursor over the program’s taskbar icon, which brings up the thumbnail-size preview. Then move your mouse cursor to hover over the thumbnail preview itself. When you do, the relevant window will come to the fore, and all others will fade to the background. When you move the cursor off the thumbnail preview, your desktop window arrangement reverts to its previous state. And if you click on the thumbnail preview, you can bring that window to the front.

Incidentally, Windows 7 also lets you close the program window straight from the thumbnail, using the red “x” at upper right or by clicking the center button on your mouse—typically the scroll wheel, if it has one.