Resize Program Windows with Snap

Most of the the time, when you’re working in AutoCAD LT, you’ve got it maximized to completely fill up your screen. But what if you need to see two programs at once? Maybe you need to see a drawing and your e-mail, or a drawing and an Excel file, or a PowerPoint and an Excel file…you get the picture.

You’ve always been able to do this (more or less) by resizing windows and dragging them around your desktop, or with the “tile windows” option, but that’s imprecise at best.

In Windows 7, however, all you need to do to make a program window take up exactly half of your screen is to click-and-drag its titlebar over to the left or right side of your screen. When it gets close enough, a glassy outline appears showing you what will happen when you release the mouse button.

(Click the images for a larger view.)

Then you can do the same thing for a program on the other side of the desktop, and you have two perfectly sized windows to work with. This is most impressive on a wide-screen monitor (which mine is not), but you get the idea.

When you’re done, just click-and-drag the titlebar of a program to the top of your desktop to have it fill the entire screen again.

This only works with actual program instances, not with multiple open drawings in a single session of AutoCAD LT, but even so I find I use it all the time, especially for Word, Excel, Firefox, etc. It’s definitely one of my favorite quick-and-easy Windows 7 features.

<Update> With the assistance of my cat (who likes to "help" me type), I just discovered a keyboard shortcut for this: Windows key + Left/Right arrows will snap the active window to the left or right side, or un-snap it if it's already been snapped.