How To CUSTOMIZE The Windows 11 TASKBAR Tutorial

everyone thanks for joining today today I want to show you how to completely customize your windows 11 taskbar experience I'm going to show you some taskbar settings like pinning and unpinning apps controlling taskbar behavior and how to set up your taskbar for multiple monitors so let's get started all right well let's get into a brief overview of the taskbar so if you're familiar with Windows 10 you know you've had the taskbar has been here for a long long time way back to uh Windows XP Windows 7 there's always been some kind of taskbar which is kind of like our control center um it's where we're going to see the apps that we have opened it's it's going to show us where our pinned apps are and we're going to talk about some of that in this uh in this video so let's start from the the over here on the the left hand side and let's work our way to the right this here is our our informational menu um so when we highlight over this this is going to be set to your region if you set up Windows 11 for the first time or if you upgraded it's going to find your location based on uh your settings based on your technically based on your IP address if you allow it uh and it's going to give me the uh temperature it's going to give me my weather forecast it's going to give me the current updates for whatever is going on in my world and um any kind of travel things and these are called widgets and we we're not going to talk about that in this video but we will get into that in a uh another video down the line coming over here we have the infamous start Windows start menu uh we will talk about that in this video as well when I click on that uh all the apps that I have pinned here show up as well as a button for all the alphabetized apps that come with device or things that I could actually install some of these I will be honest are what we would call bloatware um items that just come standard that take up memory that take up resources that we will probably never use and probably could be removed again up that's going to be in an upcoming video all right we have our search bar here I can do searches for anything uh on the computer itself um I could look for something in uh in the actual hard drives or somewhere on the storage system or actually out on the internet all right continuing to the right here this is a preloaded version a preview of co-pilot uh Microsoft has released co-pilot as their embedded AI artificial intelligence for uh the operating system this button right here is if you wanted to add additional desk desktops well you think to yourself wait a minute I only have one desktop uh you can set up more than one virtual desktop and we will talk about that in an upcoming video next to that are teams Microsoft teams is your communication platform of choice for the Microsoft Office 365 series um a lot of businesses use this as well as home users who want to connect with family and friends uh across States across the street or across the world here you can see some apps I have open you can notice that it'll highlight it and I can show it will show me it's open because it's got this little bubble underneath it and it tells me kind of a preview of what's going on in that window over this side here we have our little corner icons we have the hidden or the extended icons we'll look at later and we have the icons that are available to us you see here we have one drive I have my microphone settings I have my network internet access my speakers and over here is my date time and communication settings that we discussed in a previous video that we put out a couple weeks ago all right so that is a brief overview of the taskbar uh a little bit of terminology before we get into the nuts and bolts of customizing the windows 11 taskbar so let's talk about pinning and unpinning applications so the nice thing about the taskbar is that it's going to keep a history of the apps you have open as well as the ones that are kind of your favorites so you can see I have YouTube down here uh Microsoft Office Amazon so how do they get to their begin with so I'm going to go over here I'm going to search uh for an app that I want to use frequently um I'm going to go ahead and pick the paint app so I'm going to highlight over top of that not going to click it just yet but I am going to rightclick on it so with not my left Mouse button but my right Mouse button brings up a contextual menu which tells me some things I can do with that specific menu Choice one of them is pin to the taskbar so I'm going to click that one with my left Mouse button and now I have the paint icon pinned to my taskbar that will always be there until I unpin it so what I can do here is I can now click on that without having to delve into the actual menu to look for it and I can close it if I want to unpin it I simply reverse the process I rightclick and unpin from task boox bar all right let's talk about the special default icons previously on the introduction I talked about these five icons right here well not so much an icon with search uh kind of an entry little entry bar here uh but these are default icons now you can manage these you can turn these off and on these do not have to be here if you don't like them uh what I can do is I can simply rightclick on the taskbar anywhere here go of my taskbar settings and I can turn on and off co-pilot you can notice that's gone now the task view which is now gone and I can turn off the widgets menu which is kind of on the other side here I should have named that properly earlier that is the widgets menu we're going to keep that on we might use that later another thing you can do is with the start menu it's got a hidden feature to this so I can write click on the start menu and it's going to bring up a list of tasks or um applications that are more of a system level or more of the um customization of Windows for example mobility center power options Event Viewer computer man management um file explorer is probably one that we'll use a lot so it brings up the file explorer menu I can right click on that again I can also go into my shutdown or sign out depending on which I choose to do let's go ahead and move over to the right hand side of the screen to the corner icons so I'm going to again rightclick on my taskbar go into my taskbar settings and we're going to talk about managing those little icons in the corner so you can notice here I have my one drive my microphone uh networking lets me know that I'm connected speaker and so forth uh the Overflow is right here so it says show The Hidden Icon so using the icons that are not currently displayed they're kind of hidden if I click on that I have my my USB Hardware eject Google Chrome Microsoft Edge and Bluetooth and Defender devices here or applications all right what I can do is I can go into my system tra icons and I can turn these on and off if I want to so for example I could say that I don't want to see the one drive icon I could turn that off and now it shows up in my overflow let's say I wanted to show my Bluetooth I could turn Bluetooth on and now it shows in the front-facing part of the of the tray so I have a bunch of different options here printer devices Google Chrome like we said before Microsoft Edge I can turn that on I could turn all these on if I like just fill this thing up or I could keep it very limited to only the ones that I use and use the Overflow tray as needed so next we're going to talk about taskbar Behavior so I can change the appearance and the icons but I can also change the way the taskbar behaves so I'm going to click on the taskbar settings again and from here I'm going to go to taskbar behaviors scroll down and here is where I can change the alignment of the taskbar so if you want more of a Windows 10 appearance you can click the left selection and you can see that everything now is as it used to be in Windows 10 or if you prefer the new windows 11 style you can keep that centered and everything remains as it was I can also turn on or off the badges so the badges basically and I don't have any to show you here but for example if I had unread emails in Microsoft Outlook it would give me a number or show a little bubble there um I can turn that on or off so I don't see how many unread emails uh that I have or how many missed notifications I had in YouTube or other um social media applications I can also automatically hide the taskbar so if I click that button you can notice that it disappears until I scroll my mouse all the way to the bottom and then it pops back up again so if your desktop computer is configured with multiple monitors you can manage your taskbar across more than one monitor so I'm going to go down to my taskbar settings again and I'm going to scroll down to taskbar behaviors and there's a selection here it says when using multiple displays show my taskbar apps on all taskbars which means currently everything you see here is duplicated on a second monitor which means the open and non-open windows and apps if I was to select this and change it to main taskbar and taskbar where window is open what happens now is everything here stays as it is since this is my main window but on the computer monitor where I have other applications running only those applications are showing up on the task bar so you don't see all this I can change this again and say taskbar where window is open now again the window it's talking about the the app or the um program that's currently running and if you notice one of those dropped off which was Microsoft wind uh Microsoft Word so the fact that word is running on a separate monitor that icon or that task is now showing up in the taskar of the second monitor where the Microsoft Word application is currently running another one of my favorite settings is the show desktop icon button so I've got a lot going on here and if you're like me it's hard to navigate getting behind all my other icons and folders so we're going to rightclick go to the taskbar settings and we're going to scroll down again to taskbar behaviors and there is a selection here for select the far corner of the taskbar to show the desktop so when we click that button it's going to be hard to notice but on the far rightand side if you keep moving your mouse over you'll see a little popup menu that says show desktop a little little line right there I click that line and I am back to my desktop everything's available to me I go back here again and click it again I get all my windows back the way they were our last setting is changing the accents and colors of the taskbar so for this we're going to go to test bar settings but then we're going to jump back to personalization and then go to Colors now in order for this to work to change the accents on the taskbar we first have to change the mode to custom and then change our default Windows mode to dark that now activates the accent color for the taskbar and start menu so now I can turn this on and if you notice it's changed to the current selected color now if you watch at the bottom I can change to all different colors here whatever I decide so I'm going to keep it as a nice teal and that's all there is to that that wraps it up for this video hopefully by now your test bar looks exactly the way you want it to look unfortunately You Can't customize everything about it but it gives you a lot more power on what your task bar does look like so thanks for watching this video and for more videos like these don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification Bell so you're alerted when we publish new videos like this my name is Steve the host of your technology coach thanks for watching

Channel: Your Technology Coach

Views: 6,664

Keywords: Windows 11 tutorial, windows tips, windows 11 tutorial for beginners, tech tips, Windows Tricks, Windows 11 Tips, Windows Tutorials, Taskbar Settings, tech tutorials, windows 11, customize, customize taskbar, taskbar 11, win 11, windows 11 customization, customization, modify, icon, left, app bar, app launcher, start menu, start, features, feature, tips, tricks, tips and tricks, new features, trick, cool features, tutorial, how to, how to customize, task manage, window 11, microsoft

Id: g4WP9zgSWRw

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024