Rob Wilkerson

A couple of months ago I got a semi-panicked phone call from my mom. Seems she had allowed Windows Update to do its thing and now her Internet Explorer bookmarks, ahem Favorites, weren't there. I couldn't figure out what she was talking about until I remembered that IE7 had recently been unleashed upon the world. And the light bulb clicked on.

I'm not an IE user myself, but I did have it installed and all of this stuff works kind of the same so I dug around for a minute until I tracked down what she needed and showed her how to get it back. She was used to accessing her bookmarks - her "Favorites" - from the menu bar. Yeah, I know there are other ways, but this is what she's used to. I showed her the other ways (and some of the other upgrades), but still gave her back the menu bar. Since mom is an aggressively non-technical user, I didn't give it another thought.

Just a day or so ago, however, a co-worker who is significantly more technical mentioned that one of the things that annoyed him about IE7 was that they had removed the file menu. I remember thinking that if its absence had made enough of an impact to register annoyance then I couldn't believe he hadn't dug around a bit to find it and figure out that they didn't remove it, they just hid it from the default display. It doesn't take long.

And that got me thinking...if technical people are asking the same questions as non-technical people then maybe it's worth writing down some instructions. So...I did.

To display the "lost" file menu in IE7:

1. Locate the Tools menu on the far right of the user interface and click the button to display the options menu.
2. Click on the Menu Bar option.

That's it. The menu bar is back. The user interface in IE7 has changed significantly and there is a lot of good new stuff to learn - and a lot of old stuff to find. You have to root around in the muck for a bit, but it's there. I promise.