Information

• Cortana is installed as an app beginning with Windows 10 version 2004. Curiously, its name in the list of provisioned apps doesn’t include any hint of its true identity but only a number: Microsoft.549981C3F5F10.

• Feedback Hub allows anyone to create, search, share, and upvote bug reports and offer suggestions for the Windows development team.

• Get Help puts you in touch with Microsoft’s Virtual Agent. You can tell your troubles to the agent, who provides automated assistance; if that doesn’t solve your problem, you can ask to speak to a live human.

• Tips offers videos and other instructional material about Windows 10. (This app was previously known as Get Started.)

• Maps displays maps and aerial photos along with directions between points. It also offers a supported way to provide a default location for your PC, as detailed later in this chapter.

• Weather displays current conditions and detailed forecasts for locations around the world.

Communications and productivity

• The Windows Communications App package includes two apps that can be opened separately but use the same infrastructure: Mail allows you to send, receive, and manage email messages using a variety of industry-standard protocols. Calendar keeps track of appointments and other events. A separate People app manages contact information. (We cover all three apps later in this chapter.)

• Skype enables communication via text message and audio/video conferencing.

• Your Phone connects your Windows 10 device to your mobile device. On Android devices, it allows you to send and receive text messages and view or copy the most recent 2000 photos on your phone’s camera roll.

• Office, which has also been known as My Office, Get Office, and the Office Hub in its short Windows 10 career, provides details about your Microsoft 365 subscription and lists Office files that you have recently worked with.

• OneNote for Windows 10 allows you to create, store, and manage notes of all kinds, including documents scanned with a smartphone camera. It works with the same data files as the full-featured OneNote desktop app included with Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

• Sticky Notes provides a place to jot small notes that are reminiscent of the ubiquitous yellow Post-it Notes from 3M. These notes can sync with OneNote and with the Microsoft Launcher on Android devices.

Entertainment

• Groove Music is the Windows 10 default player app for files in supported audio formats. (For details, see “Music, photos, and movies,” later in this chapter.)

• Movies & TV plays personal videos and allows you to purchase or rent movies and TV shows that can also be played on Xbox consoles. (For details, see “Music, photos, and movies,” later in this chapter.)

• Microsoft Solitaire Collection includes an updated version of the classic Klondike time-waster, along with four other solo card games, with access to online challenges and tournaments and a paid, ad-free version.

• Xbox connects you to the world of computer gaming in genres ranging from card games to shoot-em-ups. (The list of provisioned apps also includes a handful of Xbox-related tools intended to perform under-the-hood tasks, including Xbox Game Bar, Xbox Game Overlay, Xbox Gaming Overlay, Xbox Identity Provider, Xbox Speech to Text Overlay, and Xbox Title-callable UI.)

Creative tools

• Microsoft Photos allows you to store, organize, and edit a collection of digital images. We cover this app later in this chapter.

• Paint 3D was introduced in Windows 10 version 1703. It was intended as a replacement for the venerable Microsoft Paint, but fans of that ancient program protested so loud that Microsoft canceled its plans to deprecate the older Paint, which still works well and which we recommend over the newer alternative.

• 3D Viewer is intended for working with 3D models and animations, while Print 3D allows you to print a model on a local printer or send it to an online print service.

• Voice Recorder, previously called Sound Recorder, uses your PC’s microphone to record audio files. You can add markers to identify key moments and use the app’s rudimentary editing tools to trim saved audio files.

• Mixed Reality Portal helps to configure a 3D headset for use with apps and games that allow the person wearing the headset to interact with an experience that mixes the physical world with digital content. For an overview of the technology, see https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/mixed-reality/.

Utilities

• Alarms & Clock shows world time and acts as an alarm, stopwatch, and timer.

• Calculator includes a programmer mode (specialized for bitwise operations on binary, octal, and hexadecimal values) along with the more common standard and scientific modes, and it can serve as a handy converter for measurements of volume, length, angles, time, and so on. Beginning with Version 1709, Calculator also performs currency conversions.

• Camera captures still images and video from a webcam.

• Snip & Sketch is a tool for capturing and editing screen images. This app, introduced in version 1809, is a more versatile program than the legacy Snipping Tool app.

Windows 10 also includes the full complement of small programs that have been part of Windows for decades: Notepad, Paint, Character Map, WordPad, and the like. You can find these programs under Windows Accessories in the list of apps on Start.

Some provisioned apps can be uninstalled using the tools in Settings > Apps. If the Uninstall command is grayed out and unavailable, it may be possible to remove a provisioned app using PowerShell commands; we recommend hiding, rather than uninstalling, any of these apps that you’d prefer not to use.

Adding and deleting accounts

To add email accounts after completing this initial configuration, open Settings by clicking the gear icon in the lower-left corner of the Mail window. Click Manage Accounts > Add Account. To delete an existing account, select it in Manage Accounts. Note that if you sign in with a Microsoft account, you cannot delete the Mail and Calendar account associated with that address. You can, however, turn off email sync options for that account, as described later in this section, which removes its entry from the Accounts list.

Linking inboxes

If you have two or more email accounts, Mail will create a separate inbox for each. Thus, you’ll see all your messages from the first account, followed by all your messages from the second, and so on. You might find it more convenient to link the accounts, thereby creating a unified inbox. To do this, open Settings > Manage Accounts > Link Inboxes. Mail presents a dialog box listing accounts available to be linked:

Supply a name for the combined inbox if you don’t like the generic name that Mail proposes. Then select each account you want to be part of the combine. If you change your mind, you can unlink the accounts by returning to this dialog box and removing check marks.

Setting sync options

To configure sync options for an account, go to Settings > Manage Accounts, select the account you want to configure, and then click Change Mailbox Sync Settings. Note that with a combined inbox, you still configure the component accounts individually. For example, if you have one email account for personal messages and another for business, you can opt to have the one synced every 15 minutes and the other only once every two hours. If you have an account you use primarily as a repository for commercial messages, you might want to set that account up so that only the most recent week’s worth of messages appear in Mail.

The default sync settings are shown in Figure 7-1. On Outlook.com and Office 365 Exchange accounts, synchronization is automatic and continuous. On accounts that use POP and IMAP to send and receive messages, Mail bases its sync frequency on your usage patterns. If you use the app with any significant frequency, it will fetch messages at shorter time intervals. In any case, you can override the app’s decision-making and configure a predetermined sync interval by opening the drop-down menu at the top of the dialog box. (This menu also includes the power-saving option to sync manually rather than at predetermined intervals.) Note that sync settings for an Outlook.com or Office 365 Exchange account do not include the option to base downloads on usage patterns.

Because sync settings apply to the device on which they’re configured and do not transfer to other devices, you can easily set up different devices for different usage scenarios. Let’s say, for example, that you have a desktop computer for use in the office and a Surface Pro tablet for use on the go. You might configure the office PC to download all mail from your server (by opening the Download Email From drop-down menu and clicking Any Time) but save disk space on the Surface Pro by collecting only messages from the last two weeks.

Setting notification options

By default, Mail announces the arrival of new mail by posting a notification to Action Center. You have the option of adding banner and audible notifications. Or you can dispense with notifications altogether. To make your wishes known, in Mail go to Settings > Notifications.

Reducing mailbox clutter with Focused Inbox

Focused Inbox is a feature that uses machine learning to sort your incoming messages into two groups: those that Mail thinks you will want to read immediately and those that are less important. With Focused Inbox, two tabs appear above the list of messages in the message header pane—Focused and Other—as shown in Figure 7-2. Incoming messages that Mail deems important appear on the Focused tab, whereas all others fall under Other.

Mail makes its determination based on the message content and on whom you exchange mail with most frequently. You can train the Focused Inbox feature to work more accurately by right-clicking a message in the message list and choosing Always Move To Other or Always Move To Focused, as shown in the next image. Use the Move To Focused or Move To Other command to move a single message from one category to the other without changing future actions for messages from that sender.

Note the Ignore option on that menu, which allows you to tell Mail to stop showing you messages in a specific conversation. This option is extremely handy if you’re part of a mailing list whose members can’t stop adding to a long, ongoing thread.

To turn the Focused Inbox feature on or off, in Mail go to Settings > Focused Inbox. Note that Focused Inbox might not be available for all types of mail accounts.

Creating a new message

To create a new message, click the New Mail icon. Above the To and Subject lines, you’ll find a ribbon that provides an elaborate set of editing tools, derived from Microsoft Word. For example, a wealth of styling options is available via the Format tab on the ribbon. Use the arrows on the ribbon to see the full set of options at your disposal:

To attach a file to your message, click the Insert tab. You can use that part of the ribbon to insert tables, pictures, and hyperlinks as well. Alternatively, you can create an attachment by dragging a file into your new message document. Mail also provides a proofreader; click Options and then click Spelling to check the spelling of your messages.

On devices that support a pen, a Draw menu option allows you to add drawings or annotations to a message using familiar drawing tools.

In a new Mail message or a reply, you can insert @mentions into an email message. An @mention of somebody’s name highlights their name in the message and adds it to the To line of the message header, helping to ensure that they see your message.

To use this feature, in the body of your message, type an @ sign and then begin typing a name or email address. Mail displays a list of suggestions that match your characters; click to add the name to your message.

After you select a contact, the name is highlighted in the message body and the name is added to the To line if it’s not already there. You can then edit the name in the message body if you like; for example, you might want to keep things informal by trimming off the last name.

When people receive a message with an @mention, it remains highlighted for good visibility. In addition, the highlighted name is a mailto: link, so when recipients click the name, it opens a new message window with the name already in the To box.

You can filter your inbox to show only messages that include an @mention with your name. Click the arrow at the top of the message header pane and choose Mentions.

Using folders

The pane to the left of the message headers provides a list of system folders—Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, and Archive—plus any folders you designated as favorites. (If the Mail window is too narrow, you’ll need to click the hamburger icon to see the folder list.) Other folders you have created on your mail server or within Mail are listed in an additional pane that appears if you click More. To create a folder in Mail, click More, and then click Create New Folder (the plus icon), to the right of All Folders or, in a combined inbox, to the right of the account name.

You can add any of your own folders to the Favorites list by right-clicking the folder and then clicking Add To Favorites. Once ensconced in the Favorites list, a folder name makes a convenient drag-and-drop target for received messages. You can also move a message from the headers pane to any folder by right-clicking the header and then clicking Move.

Adding an event

To add an event to your calendar, either click or tap New Event, or click the calendar itself. If you click New Event, you get the full Details window for the event. If you click a day or an hour on the calendar, you get a smaller version of this window, and you can move to the full view by clicking More Details. In either case, if you have Calendar configured to use more than one account, you’ll want to specify which account the new event should belong to.

In the Details view, you can use the Reminder list to specify your preferences regarding alerts. Calendar defaults to a 15-minute heads-up, but you have lots of alternatives, including None. Note that Calendar’s live tile (if you have the app pinned to Start) will also alert you to upcoming events. Set the size to wide if you want to see multiple events on the live tile. Depending on your settings, Cortana can offer reminders as well.

Figure 7-3 shows the details of a recurring event. To create such an item, click the circular Repeat icon and specify your parameters. Calendar offers daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options.

Inviting others to a meeting

To create a meeting event and invite others to join, add the email addresses of your invitees to the People section of your Details view. Then click Send. Each of the invitees will get an email message allowing him or her to send back a yes/no/maybe response. The Accept, Tentative, and Decline links, with associated drop-down options, make it easy for the invitee to respond to the invitation.

Setting options

To specify the days of your work week and the hours of your work day, click Settings > Calendar Settings. You can do a few other things as well on the Calendar Settings page, such as opting for week numbers and switching to alternative languages and calendars. If you stick with English, the calendar choices include Hijiri, Umm al-Qura, Hebrew Lunar, and Saka Era, in addition to the default Gregorian. Many other options are available for languages other than English.

Printing from Calendar

To print, click Show (the ellipsis icon in the upper-right corner of the Calendar window) and then click Print. There you can specify the starting date for your output as well as whether to print the day, week, work week, or month. A preview button gives you the opportunity to check before you commit.

Getting started

When you first run Skype, the program prompts you to create an account or sign in to an existing one. You can use your Microsoft account if you don’t already have a Skype account.

Before you start making calls, you might want to check your video, microphone, and speaker settings. Click More (the ellipsis icon above the pane on the left), click Settings, and run the tests under Audio & Video.

To find a contact, in the Search box, type your contact’s Skype account name, if you know it, or an email address. You can also type the contact’s name, but this approach might produce a long list of Skype users with identical first and last names. When you find the person you want to add, click the name to see relevant options, which depend on whether the person has a Skype account, whether you’ve chatted before, and other factors. You can right-click a name and choose Add To Favorites so that it appears prominently in your list of contacts.

Note that if you receive an unwanted contact solicitation and choose to decline, the Decline button provides additional options to block the request or report it as spam.

With your equipment checked out and your contacts list populated, you might then want to flesh out your own profile—the information your contacts will see about you. The profile screen appears when you click your own picture or name in the upper-left corner of the window, and here you can add phone information and other details. If you shot your profile photo with the rear-facing camera by mistake or simply want to transmit a different image, click Change Picture.

Placing or answering an audio or video call

To initiate an internet call, click your contact’s name and then choose one of the options that appear above the pane on the right:

Click Create Group (the rightmost icon) to add one or more people to the call. The phone icon in the center makes the call audio only. Choose the camera icon on the left to send video as well. You can also switch in and out of video during the call if the need arises—for example, if your internet connection is not strong enough to support video transmission.

Similar buttons appear if someone places a call to you. Before you answer, you’ll also get an audio signal to alert you to the call.

Calling people who don’t have Skype or aren’t online

With Skype, you can also place Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) calls to people who don’t have Skype accounts or are not online. The calls are charged at per-minute rates that vary by country or region. Before placing a call, you can buy credit by clicking your profile icon and choosing Skype To Phone.

When you’re ready to call, press Ctrl+D. On the dialer that appears, type or click the numbers to dial, and then click the phone icon. Note that you can also enter letters, which is handy for phone numbers—usually for a business—that are presented as letters or a word.

While you’re on a call, notice that when you switch to another app, Skype switches to mini view—a small window that includes the video (if it’s a video call) and controls for muting your microphone and hanging up the call. The window stays in front of other windows, leaving you a small, but unobstructed, view of the action.

Sending text or video messages, pictures, or files

To send a text message, select a contact name and then type in the text box that appears at the bottom of the window. (You can also send text while you’re in an audio or video call.) To send a video message to someone, click the video-camera icon to the right of the text box. Your camera will come to life, your shining visage will appear on the screen, and you can click the red Record button when you’re ready to start. Click the Send button when you’re satisfied and ready to transmit.

To send a photo or a file, click the nearby Add Files icon.

Using Groove Music

Every installation of Windows 10 sets Groove Music as the default music player, unless you choose a different app when you first set up a user profile. If you used this app in its previous incarnations, the basic look and feel should be familiar. One area that has changed repeatedly over the short life of Windows 10 is the primary navigation list at the top of the pane on the left. With the demise of the Groove Music Pass service, this section now contains only three links: My Music, which displays the contents of albums and songs in your music library; Recent Plays, which shows the names of tracks and albums you’ve been listening to lately; and Now Playing, which shows the currently selected album or playlist.

Below those core navigation links is the Playlists option, which opens a pane where you can create custom playlists from tracks in your library and manage previously created playlists.

The navigation pane—that thin column of icons on the left—follows the same interface conventions as other modern apps. If the app’s window is wide enough, the labels for the navigation pane appear automatically; to make those labels visible, or to hide them if you want more room for the current view, click the Maximize/Minimize Navigation Pane (aka “hamburger”) button at the top of the pane. Figure 7-5 offers an overview of the Groove interface with the navigation pane expanded to show all its labels.

The design of the Groove Music app isn’t difficult to figure out. A menu pane on the left provides a way for you to choose what you want to play from your local music collection. To change the way your collection is displayed, click the My Music tab and then choose Albums, Artists, or Songs. To display the current album or playlist, click Now Playing. Your custom playlists appear at the bottom of the left pane.

Figure 7-6 shows the options that appear when you click to display the contents of an individual album. (A menu of additional options for the album appears when you click the ellipsis to the right of the Add To command.)

The option to select individual songs from an album or playlist (or from the Songs view) isn’t immediately obvious. When you select an album, for example, track numbers appear to the left of each song. Move the mouse pointer over the track to reveal a check box where the track number had been, along with Play and Add To buttons. (With songs in a playlist or in the Songs view, the check box appears to the left of the track name.) After you click to select one song, check boxes appear to the left of all other tracks in the current album or playlist.

As we noted earlier, Groove Music no longer integrates with OneDrive. Any compatible files you save to the Music folder in OneDrive must be synced to the local device to be available for playback.

As Figure 7-7 shows, search terms you enter in the box at the top of the navigation pane return results showing artists, albums, songs, and playlists from your collection.

Troubleshooting

You can’t hear any sound from your speakers

Modern PCs often have multiple playback channels, in both digital and analog formats. Audio playback hardware can be found in various locations: on your motherboard; as an optional feature on an add-in video card, with multichannel sound typically delivered over an HDMI cable; on an add-in sound card; or through headphones connected physically or wirelessly using a Bluetooth connection. It’s not unusual to find multiple audio playback options in a single PC, especially one that has been upgraded extensively.

If your hardware and drivers appear to be installed correctly, but you’re unable to hear any sound, click the speaker icon in the notification area and look at the playback device listed above the volume slider. Click the arrow to its right to choose from a list of alternate playback devices.

To change the default device, right-click the speaker icon in the notification area at the right side of the taskbar and click Sounds. This opens the Sound dialog box from Control Panel; select the Playback tab. Look for a green check mark next to the device currently designated as the default playback device. In the following example, the built-in speakers are disabled, and headphones connected via Bluetooth are used for communications programs and for playback. To change the default playback device, click the Speakers/Headphones option that corresponds to the device you want to use (the exact wording varies depending on how the driver developer chose to implement it) and then click Set Default:

• For details on how to configure hardware and install drivers to unlock the functionality of those devices, see Chapter 14, “Hardware and devices.”

One new and noteworthy feature that arrived in Groove Music after the release of Windows 10 version 1803 is the playback equalizer. From the Settings page, click Equalizer to open the control shown in Figure 7-8, and then drag the sliders for each of the five frequency ranges up or down. You can choose from several preset arrangements or create a single Custom setting. Choose the Flat option to play back with no adjustments.

Using Windows Media Player to rip CDs

If you prefer the familiar Windows Media Player interface to the more modern Groove Music app, relief is a search away. We don’t recommend Windows Media Player for new Windows 10 users, but if you’re already comfortable with its quirks, it’s a thoroughly appropriate choice.

We don’t include exhaustive instructions for Windows Media Player in this edition. (If you’re interested in that, pick up a copy of Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press, 2011.) The single most important task Windows Media Player can perform that Groove Music can’t is to convert (“rip”) tracks from an audio CD and save them in digital formats on your local hard drive, as shown in Figure 7-9.

When you’re connected to the internet, Windows Media Player consults its online data sources to determine the name of your disc, as well as the names of the artist or artists and tracks and the genre of music the disc contains. This information is used to automatically tag and name tracks. You can use Windows Media Player, File Explorer, or a third-party tag editor to change those tags if necessary.

Windows Media Player copies each CD track to a separate file and stores it, by default, in the Music folder in the user profile of the currently signed-in user (%UserProfile%Music). Using the album metadata, Windows Media Player creates a folder for each artist and a subfolder for each album by that artist.

The digital files you create by ripping a CD are completely free of technical restrictions on your ability to play them back or make identical copies: you can listen to the saved tracks on your PC or on a mobile device, burn a collection of tracks to a custom CD, or copy those tracks to another PC or to OneDrive. Before you use Windows Media Player to rip a CD, however, it’s wise to check the program’s settings.

For compatibility with the maximum number of devices, the widely used MP3 format is best.

To set your preferences after inserting a CD, click the Rip Settings button on the Player toolbar. (You can also reach this dialog box by clicking Organize > Options, and then clicking the Rip Music tab.) Click Format, and then choose one of the eight available formats, as shown in Figure 7-10. If you choose a format that allows lossy compression, use the slider at the bottom of the dialog box to choose a quality level.

As long as you have that dialog box open, use the options at the top to specify the location where you want your ripped files saved and to define the default naming convention for individual tracks.

Using the Photos app to crop and edit pictures

The greatest strength of the Photos app is its collection of lightweight editing tools. After opening an image, click or tap Edit & Create > Edit on the menu bar to reveal the lean and efficient layout shown in Figure 7-14. This user experience has evolved substantially over the past few years, from a frankly clunky set of categorized editing tools to the simple but powerful assortment shown here.

To quickly turn a casual shot into something worth keeping and sharing, start with the cropping, flipping, rotating, and straightening tools shown in Figure 7-14. (If they’re not visible, click the Crop & Rotate button, at the top of the pane.)

To select the portion of the image you want to keep, cutting out extraneous parts of the picture, grab any of the four corners and drag. Use the controls on the right for more focused tasks:

• Aspect Ratio Click this button to lock a specific aspect ratio into place. The Custom option allows free-form cropping, whereas all other options adjust width and height simultaneously to preserve the ratio you choose from the drop-down list, as shown in the detail that follows Figure 7-14.

• Flip Use this option to change a picture to its mirror image, flipping the left-right orientation. This can be useful to make a picture fit a layout. It’s generally not a good idea to use this tool with images that contain text.

• Rotate Click or tap this control to shift the angle of the picture 90 degrees at a time, to fix images that are sideways or upside down.

The vertical slider to the right of the image allows you to straighten a picture by moving the horizon of the image in either direction, one degree at a time, for those occasions when you were holding the camera at a slight angle when the picture was snapped.

Click Reset to undo any changes and start over.

All other editing controls are arranged into two groups, which appear along the right side of the selected photo when you click a button at the top of the pane. Click Filters to see the editing options, including 15 predefined filters, shown in Figure 7-15.

The slider at the top of the editing pane applies algorithmic fixes to lighting, contrast, color, and the like. Move the slider to the left for a darker image, or to the right for more light.

Each of the 15 filters beneath the Enhance slider applies a set of effects that collectively give the image a distinctive look and feel. Use the Filter Intensity slider to adjust the filter’s effects. There’s no penalty in trying different filters to see whether you like the result; you can always choose Original (the first item in the list of filters) to remove all effects.

Click Adjustments to switch to a different set of editing tools, as shown in Figure 7-16.

The two sliders at the top of this pane work in straightforward fashion. Slide the Light bar to the left to make an overexposed photo darker, or to the right to brighten an image that seems a little too dark.

Use the Color slider to change the temperature, tint, or saturation of the image—for example, to compensate for a blue tint from indoor lighting. Move the bar all the way to the left to remove all color, converting the image to monochrome, and to the right to punch up the saturation of the image. Either effect is best used in moderation.

Click the arrow to the left of either slider to expose more fine-grained controls, as shown earlier in Figure 7-16.

If you don’t like the results after tinkering with these effects, click the Reset option just above either slider to return it to the neutral setting and start over.

The remaining editing controls in this pane have the following effects:

• Clarity Use this slider to emphasize or deemphasize highlights and shadows, making the image sharper by sliding the bar to the right, or softening its focus by moving that slider to the left.

• Vignette Blurs and defocuses the outside edges of the image, leaving the center portion in focus. This effect, reminiscent of an old-time cameo, is useful when you want to deemphasize a potentially distracting background.

• Red Eye Removes the red-eye effect caused by using a flash when snapping photos of people. (Note that this tool has no effect on pictures of dogs and cats and other nonhuman species.)

• Spot Fix Click this option to change the mouse pointer to a tool that blurs anything you click with it. Use it to remove distractions and clutter from an image, such as blemishes from a close-up portrait.

The options at the bottom of the editing pane remain fixed regardless of which set of tools is in use. Click Cancel to revert the image to its last saved state. Click Save to apply all edits, using the same file name and replacing the current image. Click Save A Copy to leave the original image undisturbed and save the edited image in the same location, with a numeric suffix appended to the file name.

Creating albums and video projects

Previously, we discussed tools for managing an entire collection, which can be organized by date or by folder. Using the second option in the Photos app navigation bar, Albums, you can create albums made up of photos and videos you select, which in turn can be viewed as a slide show, uploaded to the cloud, or shared using any app that supports the Windows 10 Share pane. Using the Video Projects option, you can turn a selection of photos and videos into a moving picture, complete with narration, music, and transitional effects. Every album and video project has a title and a selection of pictures and videos.

The albums and video project views show creations in OneDrive as well as those stored locally. The Photos app creates some of these projects for you, based on dates, locations, and its own pattern recognition skills. The app can pick out photos containing smiling people, for example, and find pictures that contain animals or bodies of water. You can also create albums and video projects manually, adding photos from any folder as well as from OneDrive.

Switching to Albums view in the Photos app produces a scrolling list of all albums, as shown in Figure 7-17. Those you have created yourself appear at the top; albums created by Photos are shown below. Items stored in OneDrive are denoted by a cloud in the upper-left corner.

To begin creating a new album, click the big New Album rectangle. That takes you back to Collection view, where you can select items to populate your new album. Alternatively, you can start your creation in Collection view. Right-clicking a photo or video there and clicking Add To produces a menu comparable to the following figure:

To play or edit an album, click its entry in Albums view. Note that, in addition to expanding an album, you can remove items from it. Albums are made up of pointers to files only, so deletions from an album do not remove the photos within it.

Creating a new video project is similar to creating an album. Start by clicking the Video Projects item on the main menu bar. Photos responds with tiles for the projects you have already started or finished, along with a selection of items it creates for you. A New Video Project tile, similar to the New Album tile shown in Figure 7-17, gets you started with your new project. Alternatively, you can right-click an item in Collection view and choose New Video With Music from the menu shown in the previous illustration.

After you do either of the foregoing, a tile for your new creation appears in Video Projects view. When you click that tile, Photos responds by creating a video from your selection, as shown in Figure 7-18.

Note that this initial presentation represents the app’s choices about sequence, durations, and everything else. You can select individual items on the storyboard and click the headings above the storyboard to edit what Photos has given you. Alternatively, you can start over from scratch by clicking Remove All and then dragging items from the project library to the storyboard.

Editing photos with Paint

Paint (Mspaint.exe) has been a part of Windows since version 1.0. Despite its age, Paint still has a few tricks up its sleeve. Its most useful feature is the capability to save an image in an alternative format. If you saved an image in the space-hogging Windows Bitmap format, for example, you can quickly convert it to a much more efficient, compressed format, such as PNG or JPEG, by using the Save As option on the File menu, as shown in Figure 7-19.

(Paint 3D, which debuted in version 1703, is designed for a completely different set of tasks. Although it has the capability to crop two-dimensional images and export them to alternative formats, the older Paint program is much more suited for the tasks we describe in this section.)

You also can use Paint to resize an image, a capability that’s useful if your original image was captured at a high resolution (with a correspondingly large file size) and you plan to post it on a webpage or share it via email, where the large file size might be unwelcome.

To shrink an image using Paint, click Resize on the Home tab. That opens the dialog box shown in Figure 7-20, which you use to specify a percentage or an actual height or width, measured in pixels. The decrease in file size can be substantial.