3.7. Windows Flip (Alt+Tab)In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant , innovative, and extremely effective. In that era before digital cameras , MP3 files, and the Web, managing your windows was easy this way; after all, you had only about three of them. These days, however, managing all the open windows in all your open programs can be like herding cats. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your taskbar buttons , trying to find the window you want. And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktopto find a newly downloaded file, for example, or eject a disk. You'll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the "deck." In Windows Vista, the same window-shuffling tricks are available that were available in previous editions:
Tip: If you just tap Alt+Tab without holding down the Alt key, you get an effect that's often even more useful: you jump back and forth between the last two windows you've had open. It's great when, for example, you're copying sections of a Web page into a Word document. |