Sizing Windows

A Windows window can cycle among three altered states.

Moving a Window

Moving a window is easy—just drag the big, fat top edge.

Closing a Window

Microsoft wants to make absolutely sure you’re never without some method of closing a window. It offers at least nine ways to do it:

• Click the Close button (the in the upper-right corner).

• Press Alt+F4. (This one’s worth memorizing. You’ll use it everywhere in Windows.)

• Double-click the window’s upper-left corner.

• Right-click (or hold your finger on) the window’s button on the taskbar, and then choose Close from the shortcut menu.

• Point to a taskbar button without clicking. Thumbnail images of its windows appear. Point to a thumbnail; an button appears in its upper-right corner. Click it.

• On a touchscreen, tap a taskbar button with your finger. Thumbnail images of its windows appear, with buttons in their top right corners. Tap .

• Right-click the window’s title bar (top edge), and choose Close from the shortcut menu. (Touchscreen: Hold your finger down on the title bar instead.)

• In a File Explorer window, choose File→Close. That works in most other programs, too.

• Quit the program you’re using, sign off, or shut down the PC.

Be careful. In many programs, including most web browsers, closing the window also quits the program entirely.

Hiding All Windows but One

If you’ve become fond of minimizing windows—and why not?—then you’ll love this one. If you give your window’s title bar a rapid back-and-forth shake, you minimize all other windows. The one you shook stays right where it was (Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2. Top: OK, this is the state of your screen. You want to have a look at your desktop—but, oy, what a cluttered mess!
Bottom: So you give this window’s title bar a little shake—a wiggle—at least a couple of horizontal or vertical back-and-forths—and boom! All other windows are minimized to the taskbar, so you can see what you’re doing. Give the title bar a second shake to bring the hidden windows back again.
Inset: This is the Show Desktop button. It’s a tiny slice at the far-right end of the taskbar. It makes all windows vanish. Click it again to get them to reappear.

Handily enough, you can bring all the hidden windows back again, just by giving the hero window another title-bar shake.

Background Windows

When you have multiple windows open on your screen, only one window is active, which affects how it works:

• It’s in the foreground, in front of all other windows.

• It’s the window that “hears” your keystrokes and mouse clicks.

• Its Close button is black. (Background windows’ Close buttons are light gray, at least until you point to them.)

As you would assume, clicking a background window brings it to the front.

And what if it’s so far back that you can’t even see it? That’s where Windows’ window-management tools come in; read on.

Windows Snap—Now with Four Panes!

Here’s a weird, wild feature that not many people know about, probably because there’s no visible sign that it even exists. But you can neatly split the screen between two windows, full height, edge to edge of the monitor, as shown in Figure 2-3. Or, in Windows 10, even four windows. (Eight windows will have to wait until Windows 11.)

And why would you bother? Well, a full-height, half-width window is ideal for reading an article, for example. You wouldn’t want your eyes to have to keep scanning the text all the way across the football field of your screen, and you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of fussy energy trying to make the window tall enough to read without scrolling a lot. This gesture sets things up for you with one quick drag.

But this half-screen trick is even more useful when you apply it to two windows. Now it’s simple to compare two windows’ contents, or to move or copy stuff between them.

Split the screen into two windows

Here’s how Snap works. You can follow along in Figure 2-3:

1. Mash the first window to the right or left edge of the screen.

   Mouse, trackpad, finger: Using the window’s title bar as a handle, drag the window to the right or left edge of the screen (Figure 2-3). When you’ve gone far enough, Windows shows you an outline of the proposed new window shape. Let go.

   Keyboard: It’s actually much faster to use the keyboard shortcuts: to snap the window against the left side, or to snap it against the right.

   Tip:

   To move the window back again, either hit the same keystroke a few more times (it cycles left, right, original spot, over and over), or use the key with the opposite arrow key.

   At this point, your window is now hugging the side of your monitor, extending only halfway into it (Figure 2-3, top). But that’s not the end of the magic show.

2. Adjust the width of the half-window, if you like.

   That’s right: Your Windows Snap experience doesn’t have to result in a 50/50 split of the screen. It can be 60/40 or whatever you like, within reason. Just grab the inward edge of the window and drag it as wide or narrow as you like.

3. Click the miniature of the window you want to fill the other half of the screen.

   Thanks to a feature called Snap Assist, you may notice that the other open windows have shrunk down to little index cards, huddling in the empty half of the screen. They’re saying: “Which of us will you pick to fill the empty half?” Click the one you want, and voilà: two windows, perfectly splitting the available screen area (Figure 2-3, bottom).

To end the Snap session, drag a window away from the edge, or press or .

Figure 2-3. Parking two windows side by side is a convenient preparation for copying information between them or comparing their contents—and it’s super-easy.
Suppose you want to split the screen between your Twitter app and your web browser. When you drag a window to the edge of the screen, all other open windows offer themselves as candidates for the other half (top). Click one to make it fill the remaining space (bottom).

Note:

If you’re using two monitors, the or keystrokes instead make your active window jump to the other monitor. See “Multiple Monitors”.

Split the screen into three or four windows

If you have a big monitor, you might actually use this Windows 10 feature. It lets you cram four windows into quadrants of your screen, neatly filling every available pixel. You feel like you’re some kind of crazy day trader, or maybe a security guard keeping an eye on all the cameras.

Or, if you prefer, you can split the screen among three windows (25 percent, 25 percent, 50 percent).

The steps are similar to the two-pane version. Start with some open windows. Then:

1. Move the first window into a corner of the screen.

   Mouse, trackpad, finger: Using the window’s title bar as a handle, drag the window to the corner of the screen. It’s a little tricky; you have to move the cursor, or your finger, directly into the exact corner. If you don’t see the ghost outline of the proposed new window shape, drag away and try again.

   Keyboard: The keyboard shortcut is much faster and more surefire. While holding down the key, hit and then (for the upper-right corner). Or and (lower-left corner). You get the idea. Don’t hit the arrows simultaneously, but one after another.

   Tip:

   Tweaky but true: Always hit the horizontal arrow first. If you press and then , you’ll lose your window—because means “minimize this window”!

   At this point, you have one window filling one quadrant of the screen.

2. Click the second window; move it into its corner.

   Use the same techniques (drag or keyboard).

3. Move the remaining one or two windows into their corners.

   It doesn’t really matter which order you fill the corners of your screen, except in one instance: If you want only three windows to split the screen; see Figure 2-4.

To unsnap, use the opposite keyboard shortcuts. Or drag the window’s top edge with your mouse, trackpad, or finger.

Figure 2-4. Top: If you position the first two windows one above the other, then Snap Assist kicks in. It shows you miniatures of your other windows.
Bottom: If you click one of those miniatures, you get this effect: the screen split among three windows.

Tip:

If you have more than one monitor, add the Shift key to move the frontmost window to the next monitor, left or right.

The Full-Height Window Trick

This trick has never gotten much love from Microsoft’s marketing team, probably because it’s a little hard to describe. But it can be very useful.

It’s not the same as the Snap thing described previously; this one doesn’t affect the width of the window. It does, however, make the window exactly as tall as your screen, sort of like half-maximizing it.

Grab the bottom edge of your window and drag it down, to the bottom edge of your screen. The window snaps vertically to the top and bottom of your screen but maintains its width and horizontal position.

To restore the window to its original dimensions, drag its top or bottom edge away from the edge of your screen.

File Tab

Ha, fooled you! The word File here looks like all the other tabs, but it’s actually a weird kind of menu (Figure 2-5, top). The idea, as always, is to cram every possible command you might want into one central place, so you don’t have to hunt.

Here’s a rundown:

• Open new window. Creates a duplicate of the window you’re browsing. (The submenu offers another “Open new window” command, plus “Open new window in new process.” A process is a computer’s train of thought. Hard-core PC geeks sometimes like to open a new window, or a second copy of the same one, in a new computer process in case the first one crashes. Not something you’ll do every day.)

• Open Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is a command console and scripting language. If you’re a programmer, PowerShell lets you write your own simple programs, called cmdlets (“commandlets”) that can perform all kinds of automated drudgery for you: Copy or move folders, manipulate files, open or quit programs, and so on.

  You harness all this power by typing up scripts in PowerShell’s command line interface (which means no mouse, no menus, no windows—all text, like in the DOS days). In short, PowerShell is not for the layperson. If you’re an ambitious layperson, however, a Google search for PowerShell tutorial unveils all kinds of websites that teach you, step by step, how to harness this very advanced tool.

• Options. Opens the time-honored Folder Options dialog box, described in “The “Folder Options” Options”.

• Help. The Help command in the submenu opens a Bing search. The About Windows command just opens a dialog box that identifies which version of Windows you have.

• Close. Closes the File Explorer window.

• Frequent places. Here, for your convenience, is a listing of important folders in your account (Desktop, Downloads, Documents, Pictures, Music, and so on), plus folders you’ve accessed recently. The idea is to save you some burrowing.

Home Tab

This tab of the Ribbon is, more or less, an exploded view of the shortcut menu that would appear if you right-clicked a desktop icon. But Microsoft research shows that a huge number of Windows fans don’t even know about the shortcut menus—so by putting these commands in the Ribbon, the company hopes to make these useful commands more “discoverable.”

• Pin to Quick access. The “Quick access” area lists folders and files you’ve used recently, so it’s easier to get back to them later. By using this command, you can force icons to appear in this folder. See “Quick access list”.

• Copy, Paste, Cut. These commands let you copy, cut, and paste icons from one window to another.

• Copy path. This command copies the icon’s navigational path to the Clipboard, ready for pasting somewhere. (See “Copying with Copy and Paste”.)

• Paste Shortcut. If you’ve copied an icon to the Clipboard, this command pastes a shortcut icon of it—another handy way to make a shortcut (“Shortcut Icons”).

• Move to, Copy to. These handy buttons/menus make it quick and easy to move or copy selected icons to another place on your computer. The pop-up menu lists frequently and recently opened folders; you can also hit “Choose location” to specify a folder that’s not listed here. Either way, the beauty is that you can move or copy icons without having to open and position the destination window.

• Delete. The pop-up menu offers two commands: “Recycle” (moves the selected icon to the Recycle Bin) and “Permanently delete” (deletes the file forever without its usual stop in the Recycle Bin). The third item, “Show recycle confirmation,” isn’t a command—it’s an on/off switch for the “Are you sure?” message that usually appears when you put something into the Recycle Bin.

• Rename. Opens the selected icon’s name-editing box.

• New Folder. Makes a new, empty folder in the current window, ready for you to name and fill up with icons.

• New item. Here’s a catch-all drop-down menu that lists new things you might want to create in the open window: a new folder, a shortcut (“Shortcut Icons”), a contact (that is, a new person page in the People app), a Microsoft Word document, a Journal document, a text document, a compressed (zipped) folder, and so on. You may see different items here, since different programs can modify this menu to make your life more convenient.

• Easy access. Here’s an even more miscellaneous drop-down menu of useful commands; all of them apply to icons you’ve selected in the window. “Include in library” adds the selected icon to one of your libraries (“Libraries”). To understand “Map as drive,” read “Mapping Shares to Drive Letters”.

  The remaining commands—“Always available offline,” “Sync,” and “Work offline,” pertain to the offline files feature described in “Offline Files”.

• Properties. This button/menu offers two options: “Properties” opens the selected icon’s Properties dialog box, where you can read a wealth of detail about its size, type, and so on. “Remove properties” strips all that stuff out of a file, usually because you’re about to send it to somebody and don’t want them to know about its revision history, modification dates, and so on.

• Open. Do you really need a button that opens the selected icon? Yes, if it’s a type of file that more than one program can open. For example, suppose you have a picture file. Do you want to open it in Photoshop or in the Photos app? This pop-up menu changes to reflect the programs that are capable of opening the selected icon.

• Edit opens the highlighted icon in the first program Windows finds that can edit that file type.

• History. This button opens a window that tracks the file’s editing history. It’s an essential part of the File History feature described in “File History”; it lets you rewind a certain document to an earlier version.

• Select all, Select none. As you’d guess, these commands highlight all the icons in the window, or none of them.

• Invert selection. This command swaps what you’ve selected. In other words, if you’ve highlighted files A and B (but not C and D), then this command highlights files C and D and deselects A and B.

Share Tab

This tab offers a full line of controls for sharing the icons in the window—via email, fax, printer, or other people on your network.

• Share. Click to open a panel listing apps that can hand off the selected item. For example, if you’ve selected a file, the choices might include Mail (to send it as an attachment) or Dropbox (to put a copy in your Dropbox). This Share panel is a standard Windows 10 element, and it appears in many apps.

• Email. Click to open a new outgoing email message, with the selected file(s) attached, ready to address and send.

• Zip. Compresses the selected file(s) into one compact, self-contained .zip file. Great for sending a batch of related files to somebody in a way that contains all the necessary pieces.

• Burn to disc. Prompts you to insert a blank CD or DVD; Windows will burn a copy of the selected files onto that disc. (If you don’t have a disc burner, then this icon is dimmed.)

• Print. Opens the document and, depending on what kind of file it is, prepares it for printing.

• Fax. Sends the selected file to your fax modem, if you have one.

• Specific people. Makes the selected file(s) available for accessing over the network by people you specify. (Chapter 19 has details.) When you click here, a window opens up with a list of people on the network, so you can choose the lucky collaborators.

• Remove access. Turns off network sharing, so that once again you’re the only person who can see the selected files.

• Advanced security. This control, too, affects file sharing on the network. It gives you much finer control over who’s allowed to do what to the selected file: See it? Open it? Change it? Chapter 19 contains more on these file permissions.

View Tab

This tab controls the look, arrangement, and layout of the icons in the window: list view, icon view, sorted alphabetically, sorted chronologically, and so on. “View Tab” has a complete rundown of these options.

Library Tools/Manage Tab

In a few places, you get a bonus tab—with a weird double-stacked title. These tabs appear only when you’ve opened the window of a library—a special class of folders that can display the contents of other folders, wherever they may actually sit on your machine, without having to move them. You can read more about libraries in “Libraries”.

Music Tools/Play Tab

In the navigation list at the left side of a File Explorer window, folders like Music and Pictures await your inspection. Each offers a special Ribbon tab of its own. For example, when you’ve selected a music file in the Music library (either the one Windows gives you or one you’ve made yourself), the window bears a new double-decker tab called Music Tools/Play. These are your options:

• Play. Opens your music-playback program and begins playing the highlighted music. (If you’ve never selected a favorite playback program, Windows offers you a list of music programs and invites you to choose one.)

• Play all. Opens your playback app and begins playing everything in the window.

• Add to playlist. Adds the highlighted music file to a new, untitled playlist in Windows Media Player. The idea is that you can root around here, in a File Explorer window, adding files to a playlist without having to open Media Player first.

Picture Tools/Manage Tab

Opening the Pictures library folder offers a special double-decker tab, too, stocked with commands for controlling pictures. They include these:

• Rotate left, Rotate right. Turns the selected photos 90 degrees. Handy if they’re coming up turned sideways because of the way you held the camera.

• Slide show. Starts an immediate full-screen slideshow. Click the mouse or tap to go to the next picture; press the arrow keys to go faster forward or backward; press the Esc key to stop the show.

• Set as background. Instantly applies the selected photo to your desktop as its new wallpaper!

• Cast to Device. If you have an Xbox, a Miracast adapter, or another playback gadget attached to your TV, then you can send a photo or slideshow from your Windows machine to the big screen with this one click.

Tabucopia

Incredibly, that’s not all the tabs. You’ll see other tabs appear when you open certain window types. There’s a Ribbon tab just for the Recycle Bin. There’s a Disk Tools tab (when you open a disk window), a Shortcut Tools tab (for a shortcut), an Application Tools tab (for a program), and so on. Part of the fun is encountering new tabs you’ve never seen before.

Components of the Address Bar

On top of all that, the address bar houses a few additional doodads that make it easy for you to jump around on your hard drive (Figure 2-7):

Figure 2-7. The address bar is crawling with useful controls and clickable gizmos. It may take you awhile to appreciate the difference between the little to the left of the address bar and the to its right, though. The left-side one shows a list of folders you’ve had open recently; the right-side one shows addresses you’ve explicitly typed (and not passed through by clicking).

• Back (), Forward (). Just as in a web browser, the Back button opens whatever window you opened just before this one. Once you’ve used the Back button, you can then use the Forward button to return to the window where you started. Keyboard shortcuts: Alt+, Alt+.

• Recent pages list. Click the to the left of the address bar to see a list of folders you’ve had open recently; it’s like a multilevel Back button.

• Recent folders list. Click the at the right end of the address bar to see a drop-down menu of addresses you’ve recently typed.

• Up (). This delightful button, right next to the address bar, means “Open the parent folder of this one.” It’s a novice-friendly incarnation of the trusty Alt+ keystroke.

  For example, if you’ve drilled down into the USA Texas Houston folder, you could hit this button (or Alt+) to pop “upward” to the Texas folder, again for the USA folder, and so on. If you hit enough times, you wind up at your desktop.

• Contents list. This one takes some explaining, but for efficiency nuts, it’s a gift from the gods.

  It turns out that the little next to each folder name is actually a drop-down menu. Click it to see what’s in the folder name to its left.

  How is this useful? Suppose you’re viewing the contents of the USA Florida Miami folder, but you decide that the file you’re looking for is actually in the USA California folder. Do you have to click the Back button, retracing your steps to the USA folder, only to then walk back down a different branch of the folder tree? No, you don’t. You just click the that’s next to the USA folder’s name and choose California from the list.

• Refresh (). If you suspect that the window contents aren’t up to date (for example, that maybe somebody has just dropped something new into it from across the network), then click this button, or press F5, to make Windows update the display.

• Search box. Type a search phrase into this box to find what you’re looking for within this window.

What to Type into the Address Bar

When you click the tiny folder icon at the left end of the address bar (or press Alt+D), the bracket notation changes to the slash otation, meaning that you can edit the address. At this point, the address bar is like the little opening in the glass divider that lets you speak to your New York cab driver; you tell it where you want to go. Here’s what you can type there (press Enter afterward):

• A web address. You can leave off the http:// portion. Just type the body of the web address, such as www.sony.com, into this strip. When you press Enter (or click the button to the right of the address box, called the Go button), your web browser opens to the web page you specified.

• A search phrase. If you type some text into this strip that isn’t obviously a web address, then Windows assumes you’re telling it, “Go online and search for this phrase.” From here, it works exactly as though you’d typed into the address/search bar of Windows Edge.

• A folder name. You can also type one of several important folder names into this strip, such as This PC, Documents, Music, and so on. When you press Enter, that particular folder window opens.

• A program or path name. In this regard, the address bar works just like the Run command (“Run”).

In each case, as soon as you begin to type, a pop-up list of recently visited websites, files, or folders appears below the address bar. Windows is trying to save you some typing. If you see what you’re looking for, click it with the mouse, or press the key to highlight the one you want, and then press Enter.

Preview Pane

The Preview pane appears either when you click the Preview pane button (shown in Figure 2-8) or when you press Alt+P.

It can be handy when you’re examining common file types like pictures, text files, RTF files, and Office documents. As you click each icon, you see a magnified thumbnail version of what’s actually in that document. (Alas, the Preview pane can no longer play back music and movie files, right in place.)

Figure 2-8. Use the View tab of the Ribbon to summon or dismiss the Preview or Details pane at the right side of the window. (You can have only one or the other visible—not both, as you could in Windows 7.)
Choose the name of a pane once to make it appear, a second time to hide it.
Inset: The taller you make the Details pane, the more information you reveal about the selected item.

Now, the Preview pane isn’t omniscient; right out of the box, Windows can’t display the contents of oddball document types like, say, sheet-music documents or 3D modeling files. But as you install new programs, the Preview pane can get smarter. Install Office, for example, and it can display Office files’ contents; install Adobe Acrobat, and it can show you PDF files. Whether or not the Preview pane recognizes a certain document type depends on the effort expended by the programmers who wrote its program (that is, whether they wrote preview handlers for their document types).

Details Pane

To open this panel (Figure 2-8, inset), click “Details pane” on the Ribbon, or press Shift+Alt+P. You get all kinds of information about whatever icon you’ve clicked in the main part of the window: its size, date, type, and so on. Some examples:

• For a music file, the Details pane reveals the song’s duration, band and album names, genre, the star rating you’ve provided, and so on.

• For a disk icon, you get statistics about its formatting scheme, capacity, and how much of it is full.

• For a Microsoft Office document, you see when it was created and modified, how many pages it has, who wrote it, and so on.

• If nothing is selected, you get information about the open window itself: namely, how many items are in it.

• If you select several icons at once, this pane shows you the sum of their file sizes—a great feature when you’re burning a CD, for example, and don’t want to exceed the 650 MB limit. You also see the range of dates when the icons were created and modified.

What’s especially intriguing is that you can edit many of these details, just by clicking and typing.

Navigation Pane

The navigation pane is the helpful folder map at the left side of a File Explorer window. It’s come a long way, baby, since the folder hierarchy of Windows XP, and even since the navigation pane of Windows Vista. Today it’s something like a master map of your computer, with a special focus on the places and things you might want to visit most often.

Flippy arrows

The navigation list displays only disks and folders, never individual files. To see those, look at the main window, which displays the contents (folders and files) of whatever disk or folder you click.

To expand a folder or disk that appears in the nav pane, double-click its name, or click the next to its name. You’ve just turned the nav list into an outline; the contents of the folder appear in an indented list, as shown in Figure 2-10. Double-click the folder’s name again to collapse the folder listing.

Tip:

Windows can, if you like, expand the folder list automatically as you navigate your folders. Open the Music folder with your mouse, for example, and the Music folder’s flippy is automatically opened, giving you a visual representation of where you are. Sound useful? Turn it on like this: On the Ribbon’s View tab, click Options. On the View tab of the resulting Folder Options dialog box, turn on “Expand to open folder.” Click OK.

Figure 2-10. When you click a disk or folder in the navigation pane—including the This PC hierarchy—the main window displays its contents, including files and folders. Double-click to expand a disk or folder, opening a new, indented list of what’s inside; double-click again to collapse the folder list. (Clicking the flippy accomplishes the same thing.)
At deeper levels of indentation, you may not be able to read an icon’s full name. Point to it without clicking to see an identifying tooltip, as shown here.

By selectively expanding folders like this, you can, in effect, peer inside two or more folders simultaneously, all within the single navigation list. You can move files around by dragging them onto the tiny folder icons, too.

Tip:

Ordinarily, the nav pane shows only folders that Microsoft thinks you’d be interested in—folders that contain your stuff, for example. But, if you like, it can display more Windowsy folders like the Control Panel and Recycle Bin, too. On the Ribbon’s View tab, click Options; the Folder Options dialog box appears. On the View tab, turn on “Show all folders.” Click OK.

Working with Library Contents

To use a library, click its name in your navigation pane. (Try Pictures, for example.)

A special Library Tools tab appears on the Ribbon; that’s how you know you’re in a library and not just a normal folder.

Adding a Folder to an Existing Library

A library is nothing without a bunch of folders to feed into it. You can add a folder to a library (like Pictures or Music) in any of four ways, depending on where you’re starting.

• You can see the folder’s icon. If the folder is on the desktop or in a window, right-click it (or hold your finger down on it). From the shortcut menu, choose “Include in library”; the submenu lists all your existing libraries so you can choose the one you want. Figure 2-12 shows the idea.

• You can see the folder’s icon (alternate). Use the right mouse button to drag the folder onto a library’s name in the navigation pane, or into the library’s open window. Release the mouse button. From the shortcut menu, choose “Include in library.”

• You’ve opened the library window. If you’re already in the library, you can add a folder to it using the dialog box shown in Figure 2-12, bottom. Click Add, and then find and double-click the folder you want. You see it added to the “Library locations” list in the dialog box. Click OK.

The fine print

All these techniques also work for folders on external drives, USB flash drives, and shared folders on your network. There is, however, some important fine print:

• You can’t add a folder that’s on a CD or a DVD.

• You can add a folder that’s on a USB flash drive, as long as that flash drive’s icon shows up in the navigation pane when it’s inserted, under the This PC/Hard Drives heading. (A few oddball models appear under Devices With Removable Storage; they’re not allowed.) Furthermore, the folder won’t be available in the library when the flash drive isn’t inserted (duh).

• You can’t add a networked folder to a library unless it’s been indexed for searching on the PC that contains it; see “The Search Index” for details on that process.

  As an alternative, you can turn on the “available offline” feature for that networked folder. The good news is that the folder can now be part of your library even when the other PC on the network is turned off. The bad news is that you’ve basically copied that folder to your own PC, which eats up a lot of disk space and sort of defeats the purpose of adding a networked folder to your library.

Figure 2-12. Top: To add a regular folder to an existing library, open the library itself. Then, on the Library Tools/Manage tab of its Ribbon, click “Manage library.”
Bottom: This dialog box appears. Here you can add new folders or remove existing ones from the library’s concept of the world.

Removing a Folder from a Library

Getting rid of a folder is pretty straightforward. You can use any of these techniques:

• If the library window is open: Use the “Manage library” button shown at top in Figure 2-12. Click the folder’s name and then click Remove.

• If the library’s name is visible in the navigation pane: Expand the library to show the folder you want to remove. Right-click the folder’s name (or hold your finger down on it). From the shortcut menu, choose “Remove location from library.”

Remember: You’re not deleting anything important. A library only pretends to contain folders; the real ones are actually sitting in other places on your PC or network, even after the library is gone.

Creating a New Library

The starter libraries (Pictures, Music, Documents, and Videos) are awfully useful right out of the box. Truth is, they’re as far as most people probably go with the libraries feature.

But you may have good reasons to create new ones. Maybe you want to create a library for each client—and fill it with the corresponding project folders, some of which have been archived away on external drives. Maybe you want to round up folders full of fonts, clip art, and text, in readiness for submitting a graphics project to a print shop.

In any case, here are the different ways to go about it:

• From the navigation pane. Right-click the word “Library” in any window’s navigation pane, or any blank spot inside a library folder. From the shortcut menu, choose New→Library.

  A new, empty library appears, both in the Libraries window and in the list of libraries in the nav pane. It’s up to you to add folders to it, as described earlier.

• From a folder. Right-click any folder. From the shortcut menu, choose “Include in library”→“Create new library.” Bing! A new library appears in the Libraries list, named after the folder you clicked. As a handy bonus, this library already contains its first folder: the one you clicked, of course.

Properties

The Details pane shows some of the most important details about a file, but if you really want to see the entire metadata dossier for an icon, open its Properties dialog box (Figure 2-14) using one of these tactics:

• Select it. From the Home tab of the Ribbon, click Properties.

• Right-click it (or hold your finger down on it). From the shortcut menu, choose Properties.

• Alt-double-click it.

• If the icon is already highlighted, press Alt+Enter.

In each case, the Properties dialog box appears. It’s a lot like the one in previous versions of Windows, in that it displays the file’s name, location, size, and so on. But in Windows 10, it also bears a scrolling Details tab that’s sometimes teeming with metadata details.

Immortalizing Your Tweaks

Once you’ve twiddled and tweaked a File Explorer window into a perfectly efficient configuration of columns and views, you needn’t go through the same exercise for each folder. Windows can immortalize your changes as the standard setting for all your windows.

On the Ribbon’s View tab, click Options. Click the View tab. Click Apply to Folders, and confirm your decision by clicking Yes.

At this point, all your disk and folder windows open up with the same view, sorting method, and so on. You’re still free to override those standard settings on a window-by-window basis, however. (And if you change your mind again and want to make all your maverick folder windows snap back to the standard settings, then repeat the process but click Reset Folders instead.)

Sorting Files

Sorting the files in a window alphabetically or chronologically is nice, but it’s so 2014. You can now sort up, down, and sideways.

The trick is to click the “Sort by” drop-down icon, which is on the View tab of the Ribbon. As you can see, it lists every conceivable sorting criterion: Name, Date modified, Type, Size, and on and on. And if those 10 ways to sort aren’t enough, you can choose “Choose columns” from this menu to add even more options to it: Attachments, Copyright, Data rate, and so on.

Sorting in Details view

In Details view, you get another way to sort. See the column headings, like “Name,” “Size,” and “Type”? They aren’t just signposts; they’re also buttons. Click “Name” for alphabetical order, “Date modified” for chronological order, “Size” to view the largest files at the top, and so on (Figure 2-16).

To reverse the sorting order, click the column heading a second time. The tiny triangle turns upside-down.

Figure 2-16. You sort a List view by clicking the column headings. Click a second time to reverse the sorting order.
The tiny triangle shows which way you’ve sorted the window: in ascending order (for example, A to Z) or descending order (Z to A).
(Hint: When the smallest portion of the triangle is at the top, the smallest files are listed first when viewed in size order.)

Note:

Within each window, Windows groups folders separately from files. They get sorted, too, but within their own little folder ghetto.

Grouping

Grouping means “adding headings within the window and clustering the icons beneath the headings.” The effect is shown in Figure 2-17 (“Yesterday,” “Earlier this month,” and so on), and so is the procedure. Try it out; grouping can be a great way to wrangle some order from a seething mass of icons.

Don’t forget that you can flip the sorting order of your groups. Reopen that shortcut menu and the “Group by” submenu, and specify Ascending or Descending.

Filtering

Filtering, a feature available only in Details view, means hiding. When you turn on filtering, a bunch of the icons in a window disappear, which can make filtering a sore subject for novices.

Figure 2-17. To group the icons in a window, use the “Group by” drop-down menu in the Ribbon, on the View tab. (If the window isn’t especially wide, then you might see only the icon for the menu, not the actual words “Group by.”)
You can also find the “Group by” menu by right-clicking a blank spot in the window. Use the shortcut menu that results; that way, you don’t need the Ribbon.

On the positive side, filtering means screening out stuff you don’t care about. When you’re looking for a document you know you worked on last week, you can tell Windows to show you only the documents edited last week.

You turn on filtering by opening the drop-down menu next to the column heading you want. For instance, if you want to see only your five-star photos in the Pictures folder, then open the Rating pop-up menu.

Sometimes you’ll see a whole long list of checkboxes in one of these pop-up menus (Figure 2-18). For example, if you want to see only the PDF and Word documents in your Documents folder—or only songs by The Beatles in your Music folder—turn on the corresponding checkmarks.

Once you’ve filtered a window in Details view, you can switch to a different view; you’ll still see (and not see) the same set of icons. The address bar reminds you that you’ve turned on filtering; it might say, for example, “Research notes LongTimeAgo DOC file,” meaning “ancient Word files.”

To stop filtering, open the heading drop-down menu again and turn off the Filter checkbox.

Searching in a File Explorer Window

There’s a search box in the upper-right corner of every File Explorer window. You can use it to search just within the open window, as described in the next chapter.

Figure 2-18. You can turn on more than one checkbox. To see only Word and PDF files in this folder, for example, turn on both checkboxes. In fact, you can turn on checkboxes from more than one heading—PDF files larger than 8,000 KB, for example.

General Tab

On the General tab, you find these intriguing options:

• Open File Explorer to. When you open a new desktop window, do you want it to start out showing the contents of your “Quick access” list? Or the primary folders of your PC? Use this pop-up menu to decide.

• Browse folders. When you double-click a folder, Windows can react in one of two ways. It can either open a second window, overlapping the first, making moving or copying an icon from one into the other a piece of cake. Or it can replace the original window with a new one. This only-one-window-at-a-time behavior keeps your desktop from becoming crowded with windows. If you need to return to the previous window, the Back button takes you there. Of course, you’ll have a harder time dragging icons from one window to another using this method.

  Whatever you decide, you tell Windows using these buttons. Click either “Open each folder in the same window” or “Open each folder in its own window,” as you like.

• Click items as follows. This option lets you single-click icons to open them instead of double-clicking—a feature that might make life easier if you have a touchscreen. See “Eliminating Double-Clicks”.

  

  Figure 2-19. Here are the first two tabs of the Folder Options dialog box: General and View.
  Some of the options in the View list are contained within tiny folder icons. A double-click collapses (hides) these folder options or shows them again. For example, you can hide the “Don’t show hidden files, folders, or drives” option by collapsing the “Hidden files and folders” folder icon.

• Privacy. These two checkboxes let you turn off Windows’ tendency to list folders and files you use often in the “Quick access” list; see “Quick access list”.

• Clear File Explorer history. If you have a photographic memory and a mind like a supercomputer, you may remember that the icon at the right end of the address bar shows all the addresses you’ve typed in (the Recent Folders list). This button erases that list.

• Restore Defaults returns all the options on this dialog box to their factory settings.

View Tab

Here are the functions of the 83,000 tiny checkboxes in the View tab:

• Always show icons, never thumbnails. Windows takes great pride in displaying your document icons as documents. That is, each icon appears as a miniature of the document itself—a feature that’s especially useful in folders full of photos.

  On a slowish PC, this feature can make your processor gasp for breath. If you notice that the icons are taking forever to appear, consider turning this checkbox on.

• Always show menus. This checkbox forces the traditional Windows menu bar (File, Edit, View, and so on) to appear in every File Explorer window, without your having to tap the Alt key.

• Display file icon on thumbnails. Ordinarily, you can identify documents (think Word, Excel, PowerPoint) because their icons display the program’s logo (a big W for Word, and so on). But in Windows’ icon views (medium and larger), you see the actual document on the icon—an image of its first page. So does that mean you can no longer tell at a glance what kind of document it is?

  Don’t be silly. This option superimposes, on each thumbnail icon, a tiny “badge,” a sub-icon, that identifies what kind of file it is. (It works only on some kinds of documents, however.)

• Display file size information in folder tips. A folder tip is a rectangular balloon that appears when you point to a folder—a little yellow box that tells you what’s in that folder and how big it is on the disk. (It appears only if you’ve turned on the “Show pop-up description” checkbox described later in this list.) You turn off this checkbox if you want to see only the description, but not the size. Talk about tweaky!

• Display the full path in the title bar. When this option is on, Windows reveals the exact location of the current window in the title bar of the window—for example, (C:) Users Chris Documents. See “The File Explorer Address Bar” for more on folder paths. Seeing the path can be useful when you’re not sure which disk a folder is on, for example.

• Hidden files and folders. Microsoft grew weary of answering tech-support calls from clueless or mischievous customers who had moved or deleted critical system files, rendering their PCs crippled or useless. The company concluded that the simplest preventive measure would be to make them invisible (the files, not the customers).

  This checkbox is the result. Your personal and Windows folders, among other places, house several invisible folders and files that the average person isn’t meant to fool around with. Big Brother is watching you, but he means well.

  In times of troubleshooting or customization, you, the confident power user, can make the hidden files and folders appear by selecting “Show hidden files, folders, and drives” (they show up with dimmed icons, as though to reinforce their delicate nature). But you’ll have the smoothest possible computing career if you leave these options untouched.

• Hide empty drives. For years, the Computer (This PC) window has displayed icons for your removable-disk drives (floppy, CD, DVD, memory-card slots, whatever) even if nothing was in them. Now, though, that’s changed. Because this option comes turned on, you see icons only when you insert a disk into these drives. (It now works like the Mac, if that’s any help.)

• Hide extensions for known file types. Windows normally hides the filename extension on standard files and documents (.doc, .jpg, and so on), in an effort to make Windows seem less technical and intimidating. Your files wind up named “Groceries” and “Frank” instead of “Groceries.doc” and “Frank.jpg.”

  There are some excellent reasons, though, why you should turn this option off. See “Filename Extensions and File Associations” for more on this topic.

• Hide folder merge conflicts. When you drag a file into a window that contains an identically named file, Windows warns you; it doesn’t want you to replace one file with another accidentally.

  When you drag a folder into a window that contains an identically named folder, however, whether or not Windows warns you is up to you. If you turn this box on, you get no warning—just an insta-replace.

• Hide protected operating system files. This option is similar to “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”—except that it refers to even more important files, system files that may not be invisible but are nonetheless so important that moving or deleting them might turn your PC into a $1,000 paperweight. Turning this off, in fact, produces a warning message that’s meant to frighten away everybody but powergeeks.

• Launch folder windows in a separate process. This setting opens each folder into a different chunk of memory (RAM). In certain rare situations, this largely obsolete arrangement is more stable—but it slows down your machine slightly and unnecessarily uses memory.

• Restore previous folder windows at logon. Every time you sign out of the computer, Windows forgets which windows were open. That’s a distinct bummer, especially if you tend to work out of your Documents window, which you must therefore manually reopen every time you fire up the PC.

  If you turn on this useful checkbox, then Windows will automatically greet you with whichever windows were open when you last signed off.

• Show drive letters. Turn off this checkbox to hide the drive letters that identify each of your disk drives in the This PC window (in the navigation pane, click This PC). In other words, “Local Disk (C:)” becomes “Local Disk”—an option that might make newcomers feel less intimidated.

• Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color. This option won’t make much sense until you’ve read “Compressing Files and Folders”, which explains how Windows can encode and compress your files for better security and disk space use. Turning on this checkbox turns the names of affected icons green and blue, respectively, so you can spot them at a glance. On the other hand, encrypted or compressed files and folders operate quite normally, immediately converting back to human form when double-clicked; hence, knowing which ones have been affected isn’t particularly valuable. Turn off this box to make them look just like any other files and folders.

• Show pop-up description for folder and desktop icons. If you point to an icon, a taskbar button, a found item in Search, or whatever (without clicking), you get a tooltip—a floating, colored label that identifies what you’re pointing to. If you find tooltips distracting, then turn off this checkbox.

• Show preview handlers in preview pane. This is the on/off switch for one of Windows’ best features: seeing a preview of a selected document icon in the Preview pane. Turn it off only if your PC is grinding to a halt under the strain of all this graphics-intensive goodness.

• Show status bar. This option refers to the horizontal strip you can summon at the bottom of every File Explorer window. It shows you, in tiny type, how many items are in the window. When you select some of them, it tells you how many you’ve highlighted and how much disk space they take up—a great way to anticipate whether or not they’ll fit on some flash drive or CD.

• Use check boxes to select items. This option makes a checkbox appear on every icon you point to with your mouse, for ease of selection. “Checkbox Selection” explains all.

• Use Sharing Wizard (Recommended). Sharing files with other computers is one of the great perks of having a network. As Chapter 19 makes clear, this feature makes it much easier to understand what you’re doing. For example, it lets you specify that only certain people are allowed to access your files, and it lets you decide how much access they have. (For example, can they change the files or just see them?)

• When typing into list view. When you’ve got a File Explorer window open, teeming with a list of files, what do you want to happen when you start typing?

  In the olden days, that’d be an easy one: “Highlight an icon, of course!” That is, if you type piz, you’d highlight the file called “Pizza with Casey.jpg.” And indeed, that’s what the factory setting means: “Select the typed item in the view.”

  But Windows also has a search box in every File Explorer window. If you turn on “Automatically type into the Search Box,” then each letter you type arrives in that box, performing a real-time, letter-by-letter search of all the icons in the window. Your savings: one mouse click.

The final four options control what appears in the navigation pane at the left side of every File Explorer window. The first, “Always show availability status,” shows whether folders in online drives such as OneDrive (“OneDrive”) are available. The other three options here are described elsewhere in this chapter: “Expand to open folder” (Chapter 4), “Show all folders” (“Libraries”), and “Show libraries” (“POWER USERS’ CLINIC Hiding and Showing Individual Libraries”).

Taskbar as App Switcher

Every open window is represented by a button—an actual miniature of the window itself—that sprouts from its program’s taskbar icon. These buttons make it easy to switch among open programs and windows. Just click one to bring its associated window into the foreground, even if it’s been minimized.

Once you know what to look for, you can distinguish an open program from a closed one, a frontmost window from a background one, and so on (see Figure 2-21).

Figure 2-21. An icon without a white underline is a program you haven’t opened yet. A brightened background indicates the active (frontmost) program—Word, in this case.
Right-clicking one of these buttons lets you perform tasks on all the windows together, such as closing them all at once.

Handy Window Miniatures

If you point to a program’s button without clicking, it sprouts thumbnail images of the windows themselves. Figure 2-20 shows the effect. It’s a lot more informative than just reading the windows’ names, as in days of yore (previous Windows versions, that is). The thumbnails are especially good at helping you spot a particular web page, photo, or PDF document.

Full-Size Peeking

Those window miniatures are all fine, but the taskbar can also show you full-screen previews of your windows. It’s a feature Microsoft calls Peek.

• Mouse/trackpad: Point to a taskbar button to make the window thumbnails appear. Then, still without clicking, point to one of the thumbnails.

• Touchscreen: Tap an app’s taskbar icon to make the window thumbnails appear. Now touch the same taskbar icon a second time and pause; without lifting your fingertip, drag onto one of the thumbnails.

Windows displays that window at full size, right on the screen, even if it was minimized, buried, or hidden. Keep moving your cursor or finger across the thumbnails (if there are more than one); each time you land on a thumbnail, the full-size window preview changes to show what’s in it.

When you find the window you want, click or tap the thumbnail you’re already pointing to. The window pops open so you can work in it.

Button Groups

In the old days, opening a lot of windows produced a relatively useless display of truncated buttons. Not only were the buttons too narrow to read the names of the windows, but the buttons also appeared in chronological order, not in software-program order.

As you may have noticed, though, Windows now automatically consolidates open windows into a single program button. (There’s even a subtle visual sign that a program has multiple windows open: Its taskbar icon may appear to be “stacked,” or its underline may sprout a gray extension, like the second program in Figure 2-22.) All the Word documents are accessible from the Word icon, all the Excel documents sprout from the Excel icon, and so on.

Figure 2-22. Ordinarily, the “Ask me anything” search box (second from top) eats up a big chunk of your taskbar. If you’d rather dedicate that precious real estate to things like your taskbar buttons, then right-click (or hold your finger down on) a blank spot on the taskbar.
The shortcut menu offers a Cortana command. Its submenus include “Show search box” (the usual setup), “Show Cortana icon” (only a circle, third from top), and “Hidden” (bottom). Even if you choose “Show Cortana icon” or “Hidden,” you can still press the various search/Cortana keystrokes, like +S to search or +C to speak to Cortana.

Point to a taskbar button to see the thumbnails of the corresponding windows, complete with their names; click to jump directly to the one you want. (On a touchscreen, tap the taskbar button to see the thumbnails; tap a thumbnail to open it.)

Despite all the newfangled techniques, some of the following time-honored basics still apply:

• If a program has only one window open, you can hide or show it by hitting the program’s taskbar button—a great feature that a lot of PC fans miss. (To hide a background window, select its taskbar button twice: once to bring the window forward, then a pause, and then again to hide it.)

• To minimize, maximize, restore, or close a window, even if you can’t see it on the screen, point to its program’s button on the taskbar. When the window thumbnails pop up, right-click the one you want, and choose from the shortcut menu. (This option isn’t available without a mouse/trackpad.)

• Windows can make all open windows visible at once, either by cascading them (Figure 2-23), stacking them (horizontal slices), or displaying them in side-by-side vertical slices. To create this effect, right-click (or hold your finger down on) a blank spot on the taskbar and choose “Cascade windows” from the shortcut menu. Or choose “Show windows stacked” or “Show windows side by side.”

  

  Figure 2-23. Cascading windows are neatly arranged so you can see the title bar for each window. Click any title bar to bring that window to the foreground as the active window.

• To hide all open windows in one fell swoop, press +D. Or right-click a blank spot on the taskbar and choose “Show the desktop” from the shortcut menu. Or point to (or click) the Show Desktop rectangle at the far-right end of the taskbar.

  To bring the windows back, repeat that step.

The Taskbar as App Launcher

Each time you open a program, its icon appears on the taskbar. That’s the way it’s always been. And when you exit that program, its icon disappears from the taskbar.

These days, however, there’s a twist: You can pin a program’s icon to the taskbar so that it’s always there, even when it’s not open. One quick click opens the app. The idea, of course, is to put frequently used programs front and center, always on the screen, so you don’t even have to open the Start menu to find them.

To pin a program to the taskbar in this way, use one of these tricks:

• Drag a program’s icon directly to any spot on the taskbar, as shown in Figure 2-24. You can drag them from any File Explorer window or from the desktop.

  

  Figure 2-24. To install a program on your taskbar, drag its icon to any spot; the other icons scoot aside to make room, if necessary.

• Right-click (or hold your finger down on) a program’s icon, wherever it happens to be.

From the shortcut menu, choose “Pin to taskbar.” The icon appears instantly at the right end of the taskbar. You’re welcome to drag it into a better position.

• Right-click an open program’s taskbar icon, wherever it happens to be. From the shortcut menu, choose “Pin to taskbar.” In other words, the program’s icon might be on the taskbar now, because it’s running—but you’ve just told it to stay there even after you exit it.

Once an icon is on the taskbar, you can open it with a single click. By all means, stick your favorites there; over the years, you’ll save yourself thousands of unnecessary Start-menu trips.

If you change your mind about a program icon you’ve parked on the taskbar, it’s easy to move an icon to a new place—just drag it.

You can also remove one altogether. Right-click (or hold your finger down on) the program’s icon—in the taskbar or anywhere on your PC—and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Unpin from taskbar.”

Pinning to Jump Lists

In general, jump lists maintain themselves. Windows decides which files you’ve opened or played most recently or most frequently, and builds the jump lists accordingly. New document listings appear, older ones vanish, all without your help.

But you can also install files manually into a program’s jump list—in Windows-ese, you can pin a document to a program’s jump list so it’s not susceptible to replacement by other items.

For example, you might pin the chapters of a book you’re working on to your Word jump list. To the File Explorer jump list, you might pin the folder and disk locations you access often.

You can pin a file or folder to a taskbar jump list in any of three ways:

• From the Start menu (left side): Find an app or document listed in the left side of the Start menu. Right-click (or hold your finger down on) its name; from the shortcut menu, choose the pushpin icon ().

• From the desktop or a File Explorer window: Drag a document (or its file shortcut) directly onto a blank spot on the taskbar. (You can drag it onto its “parent” program’s icon if you really want to, but the taskbar itself is a bigger target.)

  As shown in Figure 2-26, a tooltip appears: Pin to Word 2016 (or whatever the parent program is). Release the mouse or your finger. You’ve just pinned the document to its program’s taskbar jump list.

  (If you drag a folder—or a shortcut of one—onto the taskbar, it gets pinned in the File Explorer icon’s jump list.)

Figure 2-26. Left: Drag a document icon to the taskbar.
Right: Its name now appears in its parent program’s jump list.
If you spot a Recent document that‘s worth pinning, click the pushpin icon that appears when you point to it.

• In an existing jump list, click the pushpin icon (Figure 2-26, right). Suppose, for example, the document already appears in a Recently Opened list. When you point to it with your cursor, a pushpin icon appears. By clicking it, you can move the document up into the Pinned list at the top of the jump list. Now it won’t be dislodged over time by other files you open.

  (If you have only a touchscreen, you can still pin a document this way. Swipe upward on the app’s taskbar icon to open its shortcut menu. Hold your finger down on the document to make its shortcut menu appear; tap “Pin to this list.”)

• If the file appears in another program’s jump list, then drag it onto the new program’s taskbar icon. For example, maybe you opened a document in WordPad (it’s in WordPad’s jump list), but you want to move it to Microsoft Word’s jump list.

  To do that, drag the document’s name out of WordPad’s list and then drop it onto Word’s taskbar icon. It now appears pinned in both programs’ jump lists.

Removing things from your taskbar jump lists is just as easy. Open a program’s jump list, point to (or hold your finger down on) the pushpin next to anything in the Pinned list, and choose “Unpin from this list.”

You can also erase your jump lists completely—for privacy, for example. Read on.

Jump List Caveats

Jump lists are great and all, but you should be aware of a few things:

• Jump lists don’t know when you’ve deleted a document or moved it to another folder or disk; they continue to list the file even after it’s gone. In that event, clicking the document’s listing produces only an error message. And you’re offered the chance to delete the listing (referred to as “this shortcut” in the error message) so you don’t confuse yourself again the next time.

• Some people consider jump lists a privacy risk, since they reveal everything you’ve been up to recently to whatever spouse or buddy happens to wander by. (You know who you are.)

  In that case, you can turn off jump lists, or just the incriminating items, as described next.

Jump List Settings

There are all kinds of ways to whip jump lists into submission. For example:

• Turn off jump lists. If the whole idea of Windows (or your boss) tracking what you’ve been working on upsets you, you can turn this feature off entirely. Open →→Personalization→Start. Turn off “Show recently opened items in Jump Lists on Start or the taskbar.” (The jump lists and icons still appear—but your files are no longer listed in these menus.)

• Delete one item from a jump list. For privacy, for security, or out of utter embarrassment, you may not want some file or website’s name to show up in a jump list. Just right-click (or hold your finger down) and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Remove from this list.”

• Clear a jump list completely. At other times, you may want to wipe out all your jump lists—and all your tracks. To do that, turn jump lists off (as described above) and back on again. You’ve just erased all the existing jump lists. Your jump lists are now ready to start memorizing new items.

Reinstating the Hidden Icons

Thank you, Windows, for sparing us from Creeping Iconitus. Thank you for corralling all non-Windows system-tray icons into a single bubble of their own (Figure 2-28, left).

But what if you want one of those inferior icons to appear in the system tray? What if you don’t want Windows to hide it away in the pop-up window?

No big whoop. Just drag it out of the “hidden” corral and back onto the taskbar. You can even drag it horizontally to reposition it. Or you can do it the long way: Open the Taskbar pane of Settings. See Figure 2-29.

Figure 2-29. Top: To open this control panel, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar and choose “Taskbar settings.” (Or open →→Personalization→Taskbar.)
Bottom: If you click “Select which icons appear on the taskbar,” you gain individual hide/show control over each system-tray icon that seeks some of your screen real estate.

From this settings page, you have two relevant options:

• Select which icons appear on the taskbar. You get a list of all those secondary, usually hidden status icons. You can turn them on individually (“on” means appearing on the system tray).

• Turn system icons on or off. This is a list of the basic Windows system-tray icons that are supposed to appear. Here you can hide them. If you don’t want the time eating up taskbar space, then, by golly, you can hide it.

Keyboard Control

You have complete keyboard control over the system tray. Press +B to highlight the first icon—the ∧ button. Then press the arrow keys to “walk through” the other icons. Press the space bar to “click” whatever icon is highlighted, opening its menu. (Press the Menu key, if you have one, to “right-click” the icon.)

Auto-Hiding the Taskbar

To turn on the taskbar’s auto-hiding feature, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar; choose “Taskbar settings.” The dialog box (Figure 2-29, top) offers two “Automatically hide the taskbar” settings, one each for desktop and Tablet mode (“For Hybrid PCs Only: Tablet Mode (Continuum)”). Each makes the taskbar disappear whenever you’re not using it—a clever way to devote your entire screen to app windows and yet have the taskbar at your cursortip when needed.

When this feature is turned on, the taskbar disappears whenever you click elsewhere, or whenever your cursor moves away from it. Only a thin line at the edge of the screen indicates that you have a taskbar at all. As soon as your pointer moves close to that line, the taskbar joyfully springs back into view.

Changing the Taskbar’s Size

The taskbar can accumulate a lot of buttons and icons. As a result, you may want to enlarge the taskbar to see what’s what.

• The draggy way. First, ensure that the taskbar isn’t locked (which means you can’t move or resize it). To do that, right-click (or hold your finger down on) a blank spot on the taskbar; from the shortcut menu, turn off “Lock the taskbar.”

  Now position your pointer on the upper edge of the taskbar (or, if you’ve moved the taskbar, on whichever edge is closest to the center of the screen). When the pointer turns into a double-headed arrow, drag to make the taskbar thicker or thinner.

• The dialog-box way. In the Properties dialog box for the taskbar (right-click it; choose “Taskbar settings” from the shortcut menu), an option called “Use small taskbar buttons” appears. It cuts those inch-tall taskbar icons down to half size, for a more pre-Win7 look.

Moving the Taskbar to the Sides of the Screen

Yet another approach to getting the taskbar out of your way is to rotate it so that it sits vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways:

• The draggy way. First, ensure that the taskbar isn’t locked (right-click a blank spot; from the shortcut menu, uncheck “Lock the taskbar”).

  Now you can drag the taskbar to any edge of the screen, using any blank spot in the central section as a handle. (You can even drag it to the top of your screen, if you’re a rebel.) Let go when the taskbar leaps to the edge you’ve indicated with the cursor.

• The dialog-box way. Right-click a blank spot on the taskbar; from the shortcut menu, choose “Taskbar settings.” Use the “Taskbar location on screen” drop-down menu to choose Left, Right, Top, or Bottom. (You can do this even if the taskbar is locked.)

You’ll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Most programs put their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where the taskbar and its labels might get in the way.

Address Toolbar

This toolbar offers a duplicate copy of the address bar that appears in every File Explorer window, complete with a Recent Addresses pop-up menu—except that it’s always available, even if no File Explorer window happens to be open.

Figure 2-30. Top: Make toolbars appear by right-clicking a blank area on the taskbar, if you can find one.
Bottom: Toolbars eat into your taskbar space, so use them sparingly. (All three of the basic Windows 10 toolbars are shown open here: Address, Links, and Desktop.)
If you’ve added too many icons to the toolbar, a button appears at its right end. Click it to expose a list of the commands or icons that didn’t fit.

Links Toolbar

From its name alone, you might assume that the purpose of this toolbar is to provide links to your favorite websites. And sure enough, that’s one thing it’s good for.

But in fact you can drag any icon at all onto this toolbar—files, folders, disks, programs, or whatever—to turn them into one-click buttons.

In other words, the Links toolbar duplicates the “park favorite icons” function of the Start menu’s right side, taskbar, and Quick Launch toolbar. But, in some ways, it’s better. It can display any kind of icon (unlike the regular taskbar). It’s always visible (unlike the Start menu). And it shows the icons’ names.

Here are a few possibilities of things to stash here, just to get your juices flowing:

• Install icons of the three or four programs you use the most (or a few documents you work on every day).

• Install the Recycle Bin’s icon, so you don’t have to mouse all the way over to…wherever you keep the real Recycle Bin.

• Install icons for shared folders on the network. This arrangement saves several steps when you want to connect to them.

• Install icons of websites you visit often so you can jump directly to them when you sit down in front of your PC each morning. (In Internet Explorer—though not in Edge—you can drag the tiny icon at the left end of the address bar directly onto the Links toolbar to install a web page there.)

You can drag these links around on the toolbar to put them into a different order, or remove a link by dragging it away—directly into the Recycle Bin, if you like. (They’re only shortcuts; you’re not actually deleting anything important.) To rename something here—a good idea, since horizontal space in this location is so precious—right-click it and choose Rename from the shortcut menu.

Desktop Toolbar

The Desktop toolbar (Figure 2-30, bottom) offers quick access to whichever icons are sitting on your desktop—the Recycle Bin, for example, and whatever else you’ve put there. As a convenience, it also lists a few frequently used places that aren’t on the desktop, including your personal folder, libraries, Network, Control Panel, and so on.

When it first appears, the Desktop toolbar takes the form of a » button at the right end of the taskbar. You can widen the Desktop toolbar if you like, making its buttons appear horizontally on the taskbar. But if you leave it compressed, then many of its icons sprout pop-up submenus that give you direct access to their contents. That’s a useful way to get at your stuff when your screen is filled with windows.

Redesigning Your Toolbars

To change the look of a toolbar, first unlock it. (Right-click it; from the shortcut menu, choose “Lock the taskbar,” if necessary, so that the checkmark disappears. Later, repeat this procedure to lock the taskbar again.)

Next, right-click any blank spot on the toolbar. The resulting shortcut menu offers these choices, which appear above the usual taskbar shortcut menu choices:

• View lets you change the size of the icons on the toolbar.

• Open Folder works only with the Quick Launch and Links toolbars.

  It turns out that the icons on these toolbars reflect the contents of corresponding folders on your PC. To see one, right-click a blank spot on the toolbar itself; from the shortcut menu, choose Open Folder.

  Why is that useful? Because it means you can add, rename, or delete icons en masse, by working in the folder instead of on the toolbar itself. Of course, you can also delete or rename any icon on these toolbars by right-clicking it and choosing Delete or Rename from the shortcut menu. But a window isn’t nearly as claustrophobic as the toolbar itself.

• Show Text identifies each toolbar icon with a text label.

• Show Title makes the toolbar’s name (such as “Quick Launch” or “Desktop”) appear on the toolbar.

• Close Toolbar makes the toolbar disappear.

Build Your Own Toolbars

The Quick Launch and Links toolbars are such a delight that you may find that having only one isn’t enough. You may wish to create several different Links toolbars, each stocked with the icons for a different project or person. One could contain icons for all the chapters of a book you’re writing; another could list only your games.

Fortunately, it’s easy to create as many different custom toolbars as you like, each of which behaves exactly like the Links toolbar.

Windows creates toolbars from folders, so before creating a toolbar of your own, you must create a folder and fill it with the stuff you want to toolbar-ize.

Next, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar. From the shortcut menu, choose Toolbars→“New toolbar” to open the New Toolbar dialog box. Find and click the folder you want, and then click Select Folder.

Now there’s a brand-new toolbar on your taskbar, whose buttons list the contents of the folder you selected. Feel free to tailor it as described—by changing its icon sizes, hiding or showing the icon labels, or installing new icons onto it by dragging them from other File Explorer windows.

Customizing Notifications

You can (and should) specify which apps are allowed to junk up your screen. Open →→System→“Notifications & actions” and scroll down to “Get notifications from these senders” to see the master list, with one entry for every app that might ever want your attention. (Or just tell Cortana, “Open notification settings.”)

You’ll quickly discover that every app thinks it’s important; every app wants its notifications to blast into your face when you’re working.

You, however, may not agree. You may not consider it essential to know when your kid’s Plants vs. Zombies score has changed, for example.

So: Tap an app’s name to open its individual Notifications screen. Here you’ll find settings along these lines:

• Notifications is a duplicate of the master on/off switch on the previous Settings screen. Turning this off turns off all notifications from this app.

• Show notification banners. That’s a reference to the “toast” rectangles that slide onto your screen in real time. You can turn them off for this app.

• Keep notifications private on the lock screen. This option, new in the April 2018 Update, prevents this app’s messages from appearing on the Lock screen, for your face-saving pleasure.

• Show notifications in action center. The Action Center, described starting in “The Action Center”, collects all the notifications you’ve missed since you last looked. By turning off this switch, you’re saying, “I don’t care about this app. Don’t even bother showing me.”

• Play a sound when a notification arrives. Some apps also ding or chime to get your attention when their notifications appear—unless you shut them up here.

• Number of notifications visible in action center. Some apps, like Facebook and Twitter, could swamp your screen with updates without this control. It lets you set a maximum number of items that your Action Center will round up.

• Priority of notifications in action center. You can choose, for this app, Top, High, or Normal, to indicate its placement in the notifications list.

Focus Assist: The Silence of the Toast

There are times when you might prefer not to be interrupted, distracted, or awakened by the appearance (and sound) of any app’s notification bubbles. Maybe you’re about to give a presentation and don’t want embarrassing reminders showing up.

The Notifications List

At the top of the Action Center, you’ll find the notifications from all the apps you’ve permitted to alert you, grouped by app—the first lines of all your tweets, emails, antivirus-software whines, Microsoft Store updates, weather warnings, calendar alarms, and so on. Each is date-stamped.

Here’s the fun you can have with these things:

• Tap the ∨ at far right to read more about it. For example, you can read the full body of a tweet, or read the rest of an email’s subject line. Basically, you get to read beyond the first line of whatever it was. Often, the ∨ button reveals useful buttons like Launch or Reply.

• Click an item to open the relevant app. For example, click an appointment listed there to open its information panel in Calendar. Click the name of a software update to open the Microsoft Store program to read about it and download it. Click a message’s name to open Mail, where you can read the entire message.

• Clear notifications. You can delete one message at a time (click the , or swipe or drag to the right); delete all of one app’s notifications at a time (point to the app’s name, click the ); or clear all the current messages at once (hit “Clear all notifications” at the bottom of the column). In all cases, you’re not erasing anything meaningful—only dismissing the notification.

Once you’ve had a look at the notifications that have piled up since you last checked, you can also hit “Clear all notifications” at the bottom of the column. That erases all the notifications, leaving the Action Center empty and ready for new messages.

Figure 2-33. This is the Action Center. It’s where your apps send you memos to get your attention—about incoming messages, mail, tweets, Facebook posts, security issues, app updates, and so on.
At bottom: handy one-tap tiles for adjusting important PC settings.

The Quick Action Tiles

Below the list of notifications, another useful panel appears: the Quick Action tiles. These are one-touch buttons for important functions. Clearly, this feature is intended primarily for portable gadgets like tablets, phones, and laptops, but a few are useful no matter what you’ve got:

• Tablet mode. If you have a touchscreen, you might enjoy this finger-friendly Windows 10 mode. It’s described in Chapter 12; you turn Tablet mode on and off by tapping here.

• Network opens a menu of Wi-Fi networks (and others), for ease of switching (“Connecting to a Wi-Fi Hotspot”).

• All settings is another way to open up the main Settings app. (The usual way is to choose →.)

• Nearby sharing is Microsoft’s version of Apple’s AirDrop: It’s a quick, simple way to shoot links or files to other people sitting near you, without having to mess with passwords or setup (see “File Sharing 1: Nearby Sharing”). This tile is the on/off switch.

• Airplane mode, of course, is just like airplane mode on a phone: It turns off all wireless transmission. No cellular, no Wi-Fi. Handy when the flight attendant instructs everyone to put their devices into airplane mode, of course, but also useful when you want to eke out as much battery life as possible.

• Location. A typical portable Windows machine always attempts to know where it is in the world. (You could argue that apps like Maps and Weather are more useful when they know where you are.) But sometimes it may make you a little uneasy that your PC is tracking your whereabouts. In those cases, use this switch to turn off the computer’s location tracking.

• Focus Assist is Microsoft’s “do not disturb” mode; it’s described starting in “Focus Assist: The Silence of the Toast”.

• Mobile hotspot. Tethering means using your cellularly equipped tablet or phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot—an Internet antenna—so that other devices nearby can get online. This tile, if you have it, serves as the on/off switch; see “The Mobile Hotspot”.

• Brightness. Each time you tap this tile, the brightness cycles through four settings: 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. Screen brightness is the single biggest eater of battery power, so this is a quick and easy way to adjust the degree of battery drain.

• Night light. Some studies have shown that spending time before bed bathed in the blue light of a computer, tablet, or phone screen can mess up your circadian rhythm and make it harder to fall asleep. You can therefore use this function to give your screen a warmer, less blue tint, either manually, using this tile, or on a bedtime schedule (for example, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.). See “Night Light” for details.

• Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology. It’s how you connect wireless keyboards, mice, and speakers, and this is the on/off switch.

• VPN connects you to a virtual private network—a very secure way of connecting to your corporate network across the Internet. See “Virtual Private Networking”.

• Battery saver is, of course, for portable gadgets. When it’s on, the screen dims, and the computer stops its continuous checking for email and other Internet data, all in an effort to eke out more useful time on your remaining charge. Ordinarily, Windows turns on “Battery saver” automatically when the battery falls below 20 percent of a full charge—but by hitting this tile, you can invoke it manually. Details are in “Battery Saver”.

  

  Figure 2-34. Top: When you’ve collapsed the tile farm, only one row of tiles remains—the top row. This is a very special row. They’re the four most important tiles, according to you.
  Bottom: Here’s where you control which quick actions appear, and in which order (drag them around). Whatever the top row shows here becomes the “collapsed four” shown above.

• Project. That’s project, not project. In other words, it’s for when you’re connected to a second monitor or a projector, giving a presentation. When you click this tile, you’re offered a set of options for how you want the external screen configured (“Projecting to Your PC”).

• Connect is where you set up wireless audio and video receivers. For example, it’s how you’d connect your tablet to a Bluetooth speaker, or your laptop to a Miracast receiver connected to your TV.

Although it might not be obvious, you have some control over the Quick Action tiles. You can exercise your good taste in either of two ways:

• Collapse them. Let’s face it: Of the two parts of the Action Center (the notifications at top, the on/off tiles at bottom), the upper part is the one you’ll probably check more often. These messages come in all the time.

  That’s why Microsoft set it up with a Collapse button, visible in Figure 2-33. When you click it, the Action Center hides all but the top row of tiles, as shown in Figure 2-34. All the rest of the Action Center space is devoted to your notifications.

• Rearrange them. You can go nuts rearranging the Quick Action tiles as though they’re puzzle pieces; just drag them around. Whichever tiles appear on the top row here become the Collapsed Edition of the Quick Actions (Figure 2-34).

• Delete them. You may never use, say, Night Light (“Night Light”) or, on your $4,000 64-core gaming desktop, airplane mode. So why should you have to stare at their on/off buttons on the Action Center all day?

  In →→System→“Notifications & actions”→“Add or remove quick actions,” you can turn off the tiles you never want to see.