I hope you guys are ready because today, I'm gonna
bring out the Swiss Army knife for Windows. It's called PowerToys, but don't be fooled by the name.
It's a set of professional super handy tools for everyday use and unlike a Swiss Army knife, it's
all free. For example, you're going to get "Always On Top". This allows you to pin a window on your
screen to always be on top. You'll get a free tool to resize multiple images all at once. You'll
get a global Color Picker and a cool tool called Fancy Zones. Now, there's a lot more free tools
and they're all special in their own way. I'm going to introduce you to the main ones and share
my personal favorite at the end of the video. One thing to mention, though, is that PowerToys isn't
new. It already has a long history. It was initially developed by Microsoft for Windows 95. It's
obviously got many improvements since. The current version of PowerToys is compatible with Windows
10 and 11. And the great thing is, that they've been made available open source on GitHub. You'll find
Microsoft's official documentation about PowerToys right here. To install PowerToys, head over
to this link here, and I'm going to add the direct link, as well, to the description of this video.
You're going to find the latest release, scroll down and download the "exe" version. Install it and
then launch it. Just go to your Windows icon and type in "PowerToys". You can see it right here, let's
select that. My favorite utility popped up here, "Always On Top". But before we get here, let's start
from the beginning. Under General, we get some idea about what these set of utilities do. Basically,
they help you have a better Windows experience and improve your productivity. If you have this
button on, updates will be automatically installed for you, and there have been quite a few updates
in the past months. Now, let's go to "Always On Top". This utility allows you to pin a window of your
choice to be always on top. Here's the activation key, and you can customize the shortcut, if you
need to. Let's take a look at an example. I use sticky notes quite a bit. What bothers me, though,
is that whenever I'm working, the sticky notes disappear. I want to pin them to be always on top.
Well, you can do that with PowerToys. You just have to select this window, and use the shortcut key,
'Ctrl-Windows-T'. This is going to pin my window to be on top. Now I can go ahead and work, and take a
look at my notes at the same time. You can use this during video conferences. You can use this when
you're learning. Pin the window of your choice to be always on top. Next cool utility is Awake. You
know the feeling when you upload files to your drive, and then you go for lunch, you come back
and you realize that nothing happened because your computer went to sleep? Well, you don't have
to feel like that anymore, if you use the Awake feature. So what I used to do, was to update my
System settings. I would go to my Power settings and adjust these. But then, I usually forgot to turn
them back to the default.With Awake, I don't have to worry about this because it doesn't change
your system default settings. It just enables you to overwrite them. Here, under Mode, you can
select if you want to keep awake indefinitely, or keep awake temporarily, then you can put in the
hours and minutes, and decide if you also want to keep your screen on. The great thing is that you're
going to find Awake in your system tray here. You can then adjust your settings, as you need. You
could turn it off, you could change it, or update your screen settings. Another side note is that
PowerToys is also available in your Windows tray. So, to bring it up, you can also select it
from here. The next cool utility is called Text Extractor. If I scroll down here, you'll find it
on the bottom. This one allows you to easily copy text from anywhere on the screen. So, for example,
let's say you're watching a video, and then you come across some text that you find interesting,
you want to grab that text. Well, you can do that with PowerToys Text Extractor. The shortcut key
for it is right here; you can customize it, if you want. I'm going to use it on this video, 'Windows-Shift-T', then you can select the part of the text that you want. It's going to automatically copy it
to clipboard, open up the document that you want to paste it in, and then press 'Ctrl-V'. You should
double check the text to make sure everything got picked up correctly, but it does do a pretty good
job. Next one are Mouse Utilities. "Find My Mouse" is great for people that have multiple monitors.
Press left control twice to find your mouse or shake the mouse to find it. So if I go here, start shaking
my mouse, it's spotlighted and I can easily find my mouse. Another great utility, especially if you're
presenting, is the Mouse Highlighter. If I turn this on, and use this activation shortcut key, which
I can also customize, then I get to highlight my mouse whenever I use it. This is great for for
presentations. If you're in a Teams meeting and you're supposed to be presenting, you could
activate the Mouse Highlighter to bring attention to where you are on the screen. You can customize
the highlighting options. Under Appearance and Behavior, you can define the primary button
highlight color, the secondary button highlight color, so this is if you do a right-mouse-click,
opacity, radius, and so on. In addition to this, you can turn on Mouse Pointer Crosshairs, which is a
more dramatic effect. So if I use the shortcut key, you're going to get this effect. Next up is PowerToys Run. This one is a quick launcher comparable to Apple's Spotlight. So when I use the shortcut,
'Alt-space', I get to type in the name of the app I want to launch, and then press Enter, and here
it is. Next is Screen Ruler. A great utility for those that work with images and want to measure
pixels directly under screen. Let's activate this using the shortcut key, 'Windows-Shift-M'. We're going
to see control pop-up up here on your screen. Now, let's say you're in a PowerPoint presentation and
you want to get the pixels associated with this box here. Go up to the Control, click on the plus,
hover to the side of this box, and image detection picks it up and gives you the pixels for that.
Now, if image detection doesn't work properly, you can go ahead and make your own selection, draw your
own box and see the pixels for that area. Next cool utility is the Color Picker. This gives you a quick
and simple way to pick a color from anywhere that you see on your screen. You can activate it using
the shortcut key. Once you do, you get the Color Picker show up here. So if I hover my mouse over
this, you get to see the color of this. Now, let's say you're on a website, you're looking for nice
colors to use on your Excel dashboard, you come across this video here that showcases a dashboard
with a really cool orange, you want to grab that. Just use your activation key, 'Windows-Shift-C',
hover over the bar, and click. You get to see the HEX, RGB, and HSL codes for this color. Now, on top,
if you click inside, you can make adjustments to the color that you just picked. You also get darker
and lighter versions of this color. So, if I click here and click to use these colors, I get the HEX
code associated with these, as well. To bring this over to Excel, for example, I just need to copy this,
open up Excel, go to Fill colors, More Colors, Custom, and paste in the HEX code. You can, of course, use
this across any application of your choice. The next great utility is called Image Resizer. This
one allows you to resize bulk images just by right-clicking them in your Windows Explorer. You
already have some presets here, for small, medium, large, and phone. You can also add a custom size.
So, for us, we have a specific web size that we use. So I'm just going to rename this to "Web", adjust
the width to be 800 and the height 450. That's it. You have some more options here that you can
adjust; you can also decide on the pattern that you want for the file name format. You're going
to see what this is in a second. Now, let's head over to Windows Explorer. I have these course
images that are bigger in size, so they're 2400 times 1350, and I want to bulk resize them. I'm
just going to select these, right-mouse-click and resize pictures. If you don't see this option
here, click on "Show more options". Once you click resize pictures, you're going to be able to select
the size that you want, we're going to go with the custom one that I just created for web. Adjust
these if you need to, and then click on "Resize" and you're automatically going to get a copy of
these with the original file name, followed by the custom resize option that you chose. Notice the
dimensions here have been automatically updated. I don't need to to resize these one by one. Now
comes the utility I use every single day: Fancy Zones. This one allows you to create custom windows
layout to make it easy for you to multitask. So I'm a fan of using a single monitor and I like to
arrange my windows in special ways, depending on the tasks that I'm doing. Now, I know that Windows
has its own special way of organizing but, these are not as flexible and easy to use as Fancy Zones.
Let me show you. Under "Launch layout editor", you get to define your own custom layout. So, I have one
for recording, for learning, and three-way learning. You also get some standard templates that you can
choose from, you can easily create your own custom layout by clicking on this plus. You can give it a
name, select the type that you want, I'm going to go with "Grid", and click on Create. Now, all you have to
do is make adjustments by moving these borders to add new ones, just right-mouse-click, right-mouse-click here. If you made a mistake and you want to merge them, just highlight these, and then merge
the zones together. Customize this to the way you like, once you're done, click on "Save and Apply".
You can always go back to edit, adjust the name, add a custom shortcut key combination to this, if you
want, which you can activate if you select 'Control- Windows-Alt' and then, this number and click on
Save. Now, the last one selected is going to be the default. So, if I close this, let's bring up an Excel
file here, and now I'm just going to click on this, hold down Shift and I'm going to have my zones
activated in the background. I can decide where I want to drop it in, the one that's highlighted
is where it's going to end up in when I let go of the mouse. Now if I bring up my sticky note
here, let's hold down Shift to see the different zones. I'm going to drop it in here. If you want to
switch between the zones, you can use those custom shortcut keys that you had. So, for example, if I
want to switch to my Learning Zone, I'm going to use 'Control-Windows-Alt' too. Now, that's the active
one. So if I hold down Shift now, I can drop this on this side, select my sticky notes, hold down
Shift, and drop it on the side here. If you forget what your shortcut keys are, no problem; you can
go back to PowerToys here. Launch the layout editor and just select the one that you want, or
use the activation shortcut. So, I've customized my activation shortcut to something that I can easily
remember. Now, aside from this, you have a lot more options here. So, if you're planning to use Fancy
Zones, take a look at these and see how you can optimize these to your advantage. Now, aside from
these, there are many more utilities that you might find useful depending on the type of task that
you do. For example, Keyboard Manager allows you to easily remap a key or remap a shortcut. PowerRename allows you to easily rename multiple files in Windows Explorer. This is a great tool if you
don't have complex renaming criteria. Then, you have Quick Accent. This gives you an easy way to type
accented letters. The Shortcut Guide is a great one too, especially for me who tends to forget what
some of the Windows shortcuts are. So, if you set this to hold down the Windows key, what you get to see
is this. So, I'm just holding down the Windows key for a couple of seconds, and then I get this pop-up.
And this reminds me what type of Windows shortcut combinations exist. For example, 'Windows-V' opens the
clipboard history. If I just hold down the Windows key and press V, I see my clipboard history on the
side here. So these are all the items that I've copied previously. Okay, so these are my favorites.
Now, since I discovered them, I use "Always On Top" and "Fancy Zones" pretty much every day. Let me know
what you think. If you have a personal favorite, please share below. Okay, so I hope you found
this video useful. If you did, do give it a like, share it with someone who may benefit from it, as
well, and that's it for today. Catch you next time.
