Internet Explorer 7 - A comprehensive help guide with tips and tricks for everyone

Posted on July 18, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Internet Explorer 7 Guide series!

Internet Explorer 7 - A comprehensive help guide with tips and tricks for everyone
Internet Explorer 7 - Part II - Shortcuts and more handy tips

I think just about everyone under the sun who is running Windows is now using Internet Explorer 7 as their default web browser. IE7 is big change over the previous versions of IE not only in terms of security, but also in the look and feel of the entire program. The first time I started using IE7, I could not figure out how to load up the Find window to perform a search on the current web page! It was a pain in the butt getting used to the new interface. So now that I’ve learned a few things, I thought I would write up a quick list type of guide that can make using IE7 a little more enjoyable.

1. Display the main Internet Explorer menu - It’s sad that it took me, a computer person, 2 days to figure out how to view the IE 7 menu! You can either display them temporarily by pressing the Alt key, or you can make them permanent again by going to View, Toolbars and checking off Menu Bar.

2. Perform a search through the address bar - This is something I just found out myself, but you can type in the words Find, Go, or ? in the address bar followed by some keywords and this will quickly perform a search using your default search provider. The cool thing here is that if your default search provider is Google, then typing in ? keyword, is like pressing the I’m Feeling Lucky button.

Try it out, type in ? Honda Accord into the address bar in IE7 and press Enter. You get taken straight to http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-sedan/, which is the home page of the Accord on Honda’s website! Nice!

3. Add different search providers and switch easily - This is a great way to search for something that maybe the default search engine is not the best for, i.e. books on Amazon, phone number of a business, jobs at Monster, reviews of a computer, etc. At the top right you’ll see Instant Search Box and it should have the name of the default search engine written inside the text box.

Click on the little arrow to the right of the magnifying glass, and choose Find More Providers. You’ll get a whole list of search providers for the web and for specific topics like I mentioned above. So if you’re don’t find what you want through Google, add a few providers and then before you perform a search, just click the arrow and choose another one.

4. Add a group of tabs to your favorites at one time - Here’s a nifty little trick that might come in handy once in a while. Let’s say you have 3 or 4 different tabs open and you want to add all of them to your favorites; you could manually click on each tab and add it to the Favorites or you could click on the Favorites menu option and choose Add Tab Group to Favorites.

5. Open a folder of Favorites as a group of tabs - This is also a nifty little trick whereby you can open an entire folder of Favorites each into a separate tab quickly. Click the Favorites button (not the menu option at the top, but the gold star), then navigate to the folder you want to open, and click the blue arrow to the right of the folder name. All of the pages will open on separate tabs!

6. Use the Quick Tabs button to easily switch between open tabs - I found this tip to be one of the most useful so far! I hate it when I have 5 tabs open and I have to press CNTRL + TAB to move between them. Click on the Quick Tabs button and you’ll get a thumbnail view of each web site, which you can click on to view.

The Quick Tabs icon might not be easy to find, but it’s the one to the right of the gold favorite icons and it has 4 little boxes in it. You can also click that black arrow that is to the right of the Quick Tabs button and choose the site from there.

7. Add Links toolbar to easily access your favorite pages - One problem with any browser is that you can add more than one site to load when you start up the browser, but this spawns multiple IE processes and eats up resources. So for those of us who routinely visit a few sites over and over again, it’s a lot easier to just click a button and have the page load in the same window rather than multiple windows. Also, if you’re like me and don’t use either of these methods, then you’re wasting time typing the address in over and over.

To add the Links toolbar to IE, click on View, Toolbars, and choose Links. You should now see a Links toolbar below your other bars.

If for some reason your Links bar is way off to the right or something like that, right click on any empty spot on the toolbar section and uncheck Lock the Toolbars. Now drag the Links bar down so it has it’s own space.

To add sites to the toolbar, all you have to do is drag the small icon that’s in the address bar for the site onto the Links toolbar. For example, if you go to Microsoft.com, you’ll see in the address bar Microsoft’s blue icon, which you can click on and drag down to the toolbar.