I’ve already written heady words of praise about Windows 7’s taskbar, but as “Paul” commented to that original blog I didn’t touch upon jumplists. And they are yet another reason why this OS will make your life easier when it eventually gets the full release.

The simplest way to access jumplists is by right-clicking on the relevant program icon on the taskbar. You’ll be offered a few options, such as unpinning the icon from the taskbar, but the real power comes in the list of recently accessed documents which also appear.

“So what?” some might say. After all, we’re used to the concept of recently opened documents within programs such as Word and Excel. But in my month or so of using Windows 7 beta 1 I’ve found it incredibly useful to head direct to the specific file I’m after, without having to load up the program first.

It’s even better when used with programs like Adobe Reader, which only let you see the five most recent files (by default at least). I frequently, but irregularly, look up things like timetables and the PC Pro style guide to make sure I’m using the correct abbreviations.

If I then look at five other PDFs the only way to find them is browse through an inevitably complex nest of folders and subfolders, and across a couple of different networks too. Jumplists turn this annoyance of a 30-second task into the pleasure of a one-second task.

But there’s more. For those documents you know you’ll forever look at (or even be looking at consistently for a day, week or month), you can choose to pin it to the top of the jumplist. Suddenly, it’s always a mouse movement away.

And my very final word of praise is that jumplists aren’t confined to the taskbar. Open the Start menu and there, next to the list of recently used apps, are little arrows that allow you, once more, to access recently used documents.

In fact, the only thing I object to about jumplists is the way Microsoft spells it out: JumpList. It makes what is an incredibly useful feature sound like marketing trivia. But I guess I can forgive Microsoft that for all the time it’s already saved me.