Half the online world is in landscape, like movies. The other half is is portrait, like most web pages. The iPhone and similar devices make a big deal about their ability to go back and forth. I don’t understand why computers monitors all don’t do that as well.
I got one of the last few that does. ViewSonic VP2365wb if that matters. Essential for reading old newspaper articles and clipping them into jpegs along with other useful chores.
ViewSonic used to provide an icon in the taskbar that switched you from landscape to portrait. And a series of keyboard commands that did the same thing. I can’t find those anymore.
So I do it the long way. In Windows 7, Control Panel => Appearance => Display => Change Display Settings.
Is there a way to create a taskbar shortcut that will take me directly to Change Display Settings?
I think this is controlled by the video driver, so there’s no standard Windows shortcut for changing the display orientation. With the Intel video driver, the default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-Alt-arrow. (Ctrl-Alt-UpArrow for landscape, Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow for portrait, etc). With the nVidia driver, you should be able to define your own shortcut through the nView Desktop Manager (right click on desktop and click on “nView Properties”, and enable “nView Desktop Manager” if it’s disabled). I don’t know about ATI.
By the way, the still make desktop monitors that can be used in portrait mode. It’s a fairly common feature, actually. The key word to look for in the specs is “pivot”.
Yes, I have a pivot monitor. My point is that they’re rare and I had very limited choices when I wanted to get a new one. They’re so useful they should be more common.
Unfortunately, there is no nView Properties in right click. There is a NVIDIA control panel, but it doesn’t do what I want.
What I’m asking about is if there’s a way in Windows 7 to do something like a Word macro. I.e, I would enter in the keystrokes and it would remember them so that when I clicked it I’d get taken to my destination. And it has to be pinned to the taskbar.
You should be able to at least get a shortcut to open the control panel’s Display window at the Settings tab. Under XP the command is (approximately–it looks like it may vary with service pack)
control desk.cpl,,@Settings
Here “control” is control.exe, the Windows Control Panel; and desk.cpl is the DLL for the display properties. “,@Settings” tells it to open at the Settings tab. You can also try, e.g., “,3” instead of “,@Settings”; different numbers will open different tabs.
I don’t have Windows 7, but it looks like the syntax has changed slightly (see here and here). If the command above doesn’t work, try some of the suggestions there.
Try the command from a command window to see if it works. Once you get it right, save it as a shortcut on the taskbar. (Under XP this would be “New Shortcut”, command “control”; then edit the shortcut’s Target properties to add the correct arguments.)
Making a shortcut that actually changes the properties probably requires some programming; most Microsoft tools don’t have a very complete command-line interface.
I was just trying to point out that they are common. I just went to Newegg and did a search for monitors with a pivot feature; it returned 69 results. (Not all are currently available, but many are.) Dell also has many models with this feature.
Sorry, upon further googling, it looks like nView may be only for the Quadra series, not GeForce (which I assume is what you have).
control desk.cpl,@Settings works great to get me where I want to go. But I have no idea how to save it as a shortcut to anywhere.
When I looked at monitors I found that pivot was often used loosely to mean “tiltable” or some variation rather than a transition to and from portrait to landscape. Newegg gives no hits at all for portrait or landscape. Maybe I’m wrong and I’m missing the modern definition and it’s just assumed. However, many of those monitors, like this Acer, don’t look physically capable of turning to portrait. And there are only 30 monitors that come up: the rest are mounts or out of stock. And I probably should have added “in my price range.”
If you are looking for a macro creator, I’d look into AutoHotkey. You can also send keystrokes using Windows’s default scripting, but AutoHotkey is a little more user friendly.
You can create a shortcut to Control Panel, true. But that’s still two keystrokes away from where I want to be. And putting it on the desktop is not useful to me because I would be in full-screen mode whenever I wanted to use it, adding in another keystroke. If it’s not on the taskbar, it’s of less value.
I assume that Microsoft doesn’t allow this because it doesn’t want people cluttering up their taskbars, since they used to have this incredibly annoying “feature” that told you too many icons were on your desktop and would you like to put them in a folder where you can forget that they ever existed? But like most programming people they hate and are baffled by users. I can say this since I spent years as the writing person who had to provide the interface between them.
Create this shortcut. Then right-click on the shortcut and open up its Properties dialog. Under its Shortcut tab find the Target textbox. (This is on XP; I imagine Win7 is similar.) Replace its contents with the command you used above,
The specs for this monitor says it has adjustments for “Height, Pivot, Swivel, Tilt”; that’s 3 axes of rotation, so I’m sure it can be rotated to portrait mode. You do need to raise it up before you can pivot it 90 degrees, otherwise the corner will hit the desk surface. (That’s the way most of my monitors work.)
Between work and home I have 5 LCD monitors, and 3 of them (Dell, Samsung and HP) can be pivoted to portrait mode. The other 2 are 30-inch monitors, which I really wouldn’t want to use in portrait mode.
Maybe it’s a Windows 7 issue. There is no option to choose taskbar as a shortcut location from the properties box inside the Control Panel. And when you are in the change display box right-click does not work at all. That’s what’s been stopping me from the beginning.
If I could create a shortcut directly from the Change Display to the desktop I found this simple 634-step tutorial on pinning to the taskbar. But that would only work for Display, not the Change Display box inside Display, which is not drag-and-droppable or shortcutable.
No, I’m pretty sure this can be done in Windows 7 (and the linked tutorial gives some examples of this), though it can’t be done with just drag-and-drop shortcut creation. Try this:
Right-click on your desktop; submenu New, Shortcut. This should open some sort of shortcut creation wizard.
For a location for the item, type the command above (“control desk.cpl,@Settings” or whatever [with no quotes]).
Choose whatever you like for a name; this is just the label that will appear under the shortcut’s icon.
Now you will have a new shortcut on your desktop. If you like you can right-click on it and change its icon to something more meaningful. You should be able to simply drag it to the taskbar [or possibly even give it a keyboard shortcut, but that’s another topic].
Once you’ve created it on the desktop, you can drag it to the quick launch toolbar on the task bar. Just left-click and drag it to where you want it on the toolbar.
If quick launch isn’t visible, right-click on the task bar -> Toolbars -> Quick Launch.
You can also drag the icons around in the quick launch area to arrange them the way you want. Or delete unwanted ones.
That creates the desktop shortcut. You cannot drag-and-drop from the desktop to the taskbar, though. Or change the icon, since only one choice is given.
Still, I’m very close. I think that the tutorial will put me across the final yard. So thanks for your help.
Also incorrect. In the shortcut properties, click ‘change icon’. You can have it borrow the icon from just about any executable or dll file.
Type shell32.dll into the text box labeled ‘Look for icons in this file:’ also available is moricons.dll for some old school DOS and early Windows apps.
