Hey there all you Quick Cliq-ers! … Ok, sorry that won’t happen again.
Today I want to show you how you can make S-Menus from your custom Quick Cliq menus and pin them to the task bar in Windows 7 to create a one click menu of shortcuts without having to actually run Quick Cliq. We aren’t going to pin QC to the task bar, but instead only the S-Menu.
First thing is first, Go ahead and create an S-Menu (Open the “Add/Change” window and right click one your menus and choose “Create S-Menu“) from one of your menus and save it some place safe where you won’t accidentally delete it. Now go to that S-Menu file and copy it to the clipboard (we are going to use this later). Now you can drag it to the task bar. You could stop here, but you will have to right click the task bar button and select your S-Menu everytime you want to open that menu. We want to create a single click menu button instead so that it is faster.
Go ahead and right click the shiny new task bar button we created and then right click the Quick Cliq item and choose properties. Now under the Shortcut tab highlight the target field and clear it out. Now, remember we copied the S-Menu file to our clipboard? Show the Clips menu and choose System Clipboard >> To Plain Text. Now that your clipboard has been formatted to plain text let’s paste it in the target field. You should end up with the path to the S-Menu we created.
We can now choose a new icon or just keep that awesomely pretty Q icon. Make sure you click OK. Now go back to your task bar button and right click. You should see two items, The S-Menu you created and the Quick Cliq item we just modified the shortcut for. Let’s unpin the S-Menu item from the top.
Now click that button and watch your menu magically appear at your mouse cursor. You can even close Quick Cliq (although I don’t know why you would want to stop the awesomeness that is QC, but whatever) and the menu will still work. Woo!
— You can create more pinned menus to your task bar by first creating a text file (save it some place safe again) and renaming it as an .exe file like “Blank App.exe” and then dragging that to the task bar. Now right click the button and right click the dummy exe file and choose properties. Now change the target field to point to your S-Menu. If you do it this way though you will manually have to select an icon for the button, but that’s no biggie…. right?
Stay Quick!
– John-Paul
2 Comments
Dave Yuhas · March 26, 2011 at 12:35 am
I believe you missed a step. Before dragging the .qcm file to the task bar it must first be converted to a Windows shortcut. Theres’s no place on the Properties tab of the .qcm file to edit the target.
John-Paul LaBorde · March 26, 2011 at 12:44 am
Dave – You are not editing the .qcm file, but rather the Quick Cliq shortcut. You can just drag the .qcm file to the task bar and it will create two items in that button, the .qcm file and a shortcut to Quick Cliq. We want to get rid of the shortcut to QC because we are just trying to run the .qcm file not QC so to do that we need to change the target of that QC shortcut.
This is all because Microsoft significantly changed the way the task bar and quick launch work in Vista and 7, so we have to make these ridiculous work arounds!