Microsoft Expression Web - Rearranging and Docking Task Panes

Learn how to rearrange and dock Task Panes in Microsoft Expression Web

Now that you have been working on Expression Web for awhile, you should start to have an idea of what features you are going to want to use most and where you might want to keep them to best suit your work style. As we go through this lesson, I will be showing you how to customize the interface. I have opened this page from the California Wildlife site because most of the options I will show you are only available if you have a web page open in the program. But you can create a new page for this purpose or you could open a page from any web site to follow along with everything I will be showing in this lesson. Before I start moving things around here, I want to point out that I am using a monitor that is 20 inches wide and set to a 1280 by 720 resolution. That is a rather unusual resolution. It is ideally suited for this kind of video training. But it is probably not the way your computer is set up. On my screen, keeping all of the task panes on either side of the workspace works well and I have plenty of room for all the dialogs and toolbars I can want. But on your screen resolution, you may prefer to open and close task panes depending on what you are doing. To group them all on one side or to move them around based on what you are doing. All of the task panes are detachable. You can click and drag them out in the middle of the screen. You can anchor them like this so they fill half the screen. Close them by clicking on the little arrow or you can drag them out and just have them float in the middle. So if I were working in this area of the page, I might want to keep my Apply Styles pane handy and just have it floating here. All of these panes can be closed and they can all be grouped on the left if that is where you prefer to have them. To open task panes, just go to the Task panes menu and click to select any task pane you want visible. As I bring them back, do remember the last place they were. You cannot actually save a workspace layout or multiple layout as you can in some programs. But however you customize the interface, Expression Web will remember when you close the program and open it again. If I drag all my panes over here on the left, they will group together. As we group the cells together, you will stop being able to see all of the tabs, but you can use these little arrows here to scroll through them. And then you just click on the tab to activate the panel you want to see. You could also expand and reduce the size of the panels. If you ever cannot find the panel, because you have them all grouped together like this, you can always go back to the Task panes menu and look for it there. Whatever task pane you select from the Task panes menu, will rise to the top of the file and you can always get back to the default settings simply by choosing task panes, reset workspace layout. For the most part as I am working through the lessons, I will keep the program set to the default so you can more easily follow along. But if at any point you are having trouble finding a particular task pane, you can always go back to task panes, recent workspace layout or simply select the task pane that I am talking about and it should come to the top of one of these task pane areas.