Bill Pardue's Hint on tabs, QP, IE7 and disappearing chat windows

The following tip was posted to the list serve by Bill Pardue from Arlington Heights Memorial Library. You might also recognize Bill from Slam the Boards.

This tips for working with Internet Explorer 7's tabs is so good, we decided to post it to the blog in case you missed it on the list.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up Bill!!!

- The QP Team.

Bill's Tip

Apologies if this has already been covered, but I don't recall seeing it...

If you're using IE7, you may have had the following situation while working with QP:

• You go into Outlook to read some e-mail.
• You click on a link in the message.
• Moments later, a QP session comes in and you can't find your chat window (but it keeps ringing!)
• After looking around all over the place, you finally find it in a tab that isn't currently the active one...but you've missed the call.
• Worse, you just close all your windows (even the one asking if you want to close all your tabs!) and then you just have to log back in again.

Tabbed browsing is cool, but the fact that links from other programs (like your e-mail software) usually get sent to a new tab in the most recently-used window has caused problems for some librarians who are new to the tabbed environment in IE7.  Plus, if the Chat window isn't the "top" tab, its name won't display in the task bar, so if you have lots of windows open, you may have to dig around for Chat.

However, there's a simple fix!

• In IE7, go to Tools/Internet Options. 
• Under the General tab, look for the Tabs section and click on Settings
• Look for the "Open Links from other programs in:"  section and select A new window

This setting will keep your e-mail software, etc. from opening a new tab over your chat window.  It does, of course, open more windows on your desktop, so if that's more of an issue for you, then simply ignore this.

Hope this is helpful!

Comments

[oclc_qp]

For IE 6, you want to change the setting for reusing the current IE browser window. To do this, click on Tool > Internet Options. It’s under Advanced > Browsing> look for "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts” and uncheck that option.