Seeing All Three Columns - Start Menu All Programs

My dad pitched me this question to pose to the board membership.

He's running Windows XP on the desktop computer, and he's got quite an extensive collection of programs after a good number of years now. The problem is that when he accesses the Start Menu and selects All Programs, the column menus now extend to three columns. The difficulty is that the far right most column is not completely visible on the screen now.

Given my dad's fairly advanced age (80+), I'm afraid that modifying the screen resolution setting is really not an option. Exclusive of some well-intentioned suggestion to pare down the number of programs on the All Programs menus (that's not going to happen), are there any other suggestions or fixes circulating that would somehow reorient the All Programs columns when they pulldown? And selecting the option to only display recent programs on the All Programs menu is also probably not an option.

 

It's a little hard to say just yet, but this answer could be a winner.

I'll post this off to my dad and see if it gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

 

I'd been having the same problem for quite a while and was curious what the solution might be.

Evan Omo: I tried your idea and it worked. Thanks!

 

Another option is to use folders in the start menu to catagorise your software.

A friend who is also a collector of software asked me to solve the same problem on his system.

Once I created sub folders for Office, Graphics and Internet Apps his start menu had shrunk to a managable level.

 

Scrolling works for many, personally I hate to scroll through a long All Programs list.

Categorizing or organizing similar shortcuts by moving them into newly made folders that are named something that makes sense to the user is a very good idea and I have done this myself.

May or may not be desirable but worth mentioning...
Another idea, to keep in mind, is the width of those columns will adjust if you rename some of the longer named shortcuts to a shorter name. For example, take "Microsoft small office business tools" rename it "MS business tools" and my column width shrunk taking less room to show. The longest named shortcuts determine the width of the column.

 

I think that's the explanation most reasonable when you aren't able to read three columns of menu.

The problem is likely caused by only one very long program name. One long name will cause ALL column widths to increase. It'll put the right hand column completely off the screen when an extremely long program name is used in ANY column.

 

If you do a little name shortening on your All Programs menu, you can have four columns visible:

Before shortening menu names

After shortening menu names