From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Pinning items to the taskbar

- [Instructor] Windows lists all programs installed on your computer on the Start menu. The quick shortcut to run anything is to pop up the Start menu and start typing the program's name. Notepad. From the results in the list, click to start your program. Simple, but there's a faster way. For programs you run frequently, consider pinning them to the taskbar. Windows pins a few here for you, but you can add as many as you like. Of course, with a given limit. On this system, I frequently run Microsoft Word. So to pin Word's application icon to the taskbar, pop up the Start menu, tap the Windows key on the keyboard. Type Word, right-click the search results for the program you want, choose pin to taskbar. And the icon appears here. Always ready and always easy to access. Try to populate this area with the programs you use every day. Now obviously there's only so much room here so you don't want to flood the taskbar with program icons. To work on organization, you can move a pinned item. First unlock the taskbar, right-click on a blank part of the taskbar. Remove the check mark by lock the taskbar. And now you can go ahead and reorganize these items in whatever order you like. And when you're done, right-click on the taskbar and lock it again. You want to prevent these icons from shuffling around randomly. You also want to prevent the taskbar itself from moving to a different edge of the screen. To remove an item pinned to the taskbar, right-click it and choose unpin from taskbar. Some of the items here must be removed by using the taskbar shortcut menu. For example this is the task view button. And Cortana usually appears here as well. Right-click the taskbar, and you can remove the task view button by checking this box. Obviously you can check it again to bring it back. And Cortana is disabled up here. Want a final bonus? Each one of these items is tied to a keyboard shortcut. So there are five items here. There are five keyboard shortcuts. Tap the Windows key, and then the number of the item to run the app. So this is the first app. So the Windows + 1 keyboard shortcut runs Ubuntu Linux. And there it is. You can have up to nine of these keyboard shortcuts assigned to programs on the taskbar. Though I recommend that you limit the number of pinned taskbar items to five. Whatever you use daily or most often, keep these programs handy on the taskbar.

Contents