How to pin any item to the taskbar in Windows 7

You might be wondering why I’d write a silly tutorial like this? Well, Microsoft tried improved the taskbar to increase productivity and make your computer more accessible. But the way pinning works is confusing because not everything can be pinned to the taskbar. If you cannot right click an item and select Pin Item to taskbar, you can follow this tutorial to pin virtually anything to the taskbar.

Note: I’ve already written a guide on how to Pin the Show Desktop icon to the taskbar before I discovered this trick. Click here to go to that tutorial.

How-to:

What we are going to do is pin a fake item to the taskbar and use it as scapegoat to change it to any function you’d like.

1) Pin any item to the taskbar

2a) Now the next step will depend on what you want to pin to the taskbar. We need to find the Target Location, which is an address that tells the icon where to direct you to. Here are a couple of different ways you can exploit the Target to pin what you want:

• Pinning folders as a separate item on the taskbar:

If you don’t like using jumplists, you can pin folders as an actual item. Navigate to the desired location and give the address bar a click. Copy the address that shows up. Skip to step 10.

• Pinning everything else:

Check the list here and see if you can find the item that you want to pin to your taskbar. It’s a long list so if you’d like, you can press Ctrl+F and try to search for your item with Find. If you can find it, copy the shell line (for example: shell:PicturesLibrary) and skip to Step 9.

If you cannot find what you wanted to pin, please continue on with the steps:

2b) We’re going to use the Help and Support Center to help us to find out how to tell a shortcut where a specific item is. Open the Start Menu and choose Help and Support.

Once you’ve opened Windows Help and Support, select Offline Help in the bottom right corner of the window.

3b) Now in the search box, type what you want to actually pin in the taskbar. Let’s try creating a shorcut for Computer, also known as My Computer from XP. Type My Computer into the search box.

4b) Click on the first entry. Basically you’re looking for a link or shortcut to the location that will take you there. If you click on a link they give you and it takes you to the location you want, you’ve found the correct link.

5b) Go back to the Help and Support screen, right click any white area and choose View Source.

6b) A notepad file will open. At the top, click on Format and enable Word Wrap.

7b) Press Ctrl+F on your keyboard, and search for the words that were in the link you found. For example, the link you clicked on earlier was Click to open Computer, so you would search for Click to open Computer.

8b) The next step may be a bit confusing. Once you’ve found Click to open Computer, you need to look for the word shortcut. The word shortcut is located in between the <p> and </p> tags as indicated by the dark green box below.

Once you’ve found shortcut, look immediately to the right of it and copy starting from shell to the bracket. So in this example, I would copy: shell:::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

9) Hold shift and right click the icon we pinned to the taskbar earlier, and choose Properties. Select the Shortcut tab, and paste the address into Target. Proceed to step 11.

If you followed the Pinning Everything Else method, you have to add the following code in front of what you just pasted: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe
Make sure to leave a space after exe. So here is what you would have in target if you are trying to pin an icon that takes you to My Computer in the taskbar:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe shell:::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

10) Erase anything that is in the Start in box.

You may want to change the icon too. Click on Change Icon, navigate to the following directory and choose an icon you like:

%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll

12) Click ok and you’re finished! The icon will not change unless you restart the explorer.exe process or log off then log back in.

Related posts:

1. Tweak the Windows 7 taskbar with Taskbar Overlord The Taskbar Overlord is a Windows 7 application that changes the functionality of the taskbar…
2. How to really pin the Show Desktop to Taskbar in Windows 7 Update: Fixed addresses so they now have proper forward slashes. If you don’t see these:…

. Read the rest at windows7center.com.