How to use FancyZones in Microsoft PowerToys

if you're not using microsoft power toys in windows you're missing out on some great tools power toys currently includes 11 utilities to make some of your everyday tasks easier and they're free in today's video i'll deep dive into one of these part toys that i find most useful and that's called fancy zones fancy zones helps you customize your window layouts to make multitasking easy this goes beyond the snap feature that's available in windows where you can use your window logo key along with the arrows to snap your windows to the left and to the right half of the screen or to one of the four quadrants with fancy zones you can create additional layouts using the provided templates or you can create your own custom layout since i have an ultrawide monitor i find these additional options especially useful for example i can have three of my most used apps snap easily into their own columns to really make use of the extra real estate i have on my screen also it solves one of the pain points i have with sharing my screen in microsoft teams or a zoom meeting with an ultra wide display when i share my screen the viewers see a letterbox of my screen making everything appear really small with fancy zones i can create a 1920x1080 layout where i can drop a window into and when i share that window it'll be perfectly scaled similarly when i record my tutorials for youtube i want the resolution and aspect ratio to be 1920x1080 so that my video doesn't look distorted and fancy zones make that really easy to do i can just drop whatever window i want to record in this zone that i just created then select that window to record using a recording app like obs okay so how do we use this if you don't have power toys installed already head over to the microsoft power toys page on github i put the link in the description below in the assets section click powertoyssetup.exe depending on when you're watching this video the release version might be different from what you're seeing here you can double click the downloaded file to complete the installation i won't show you the step by step of the installation as i already have mine installed but it's straightforward so once power toys is installed you can find it in the system tray click on this show hidden icons button and then you can see the icon for power toys here click on it to launch it okay so how do we actually customize our layout so first head over to fancy zones in the navigation pane to the left okay and the next thing you want to do is make sure that the fancy zones is enabled so make sure that the toggle is on and then we can head over to the launch layout editor click on it and it as you can see here i have one screen if i had multiple screen i would see screen 2 3 4 so on and so forth and it's also showing the resolution of the screen and then next we have the different templates that we can choose from as you click on the different templates you can see the layout displayed on the screen and if you want to apply the layout just double click on the template and now the layout has been applied so how do we activate the zones okay if i click and hold on to top of the any windows application and hold on to the shift key you can see now the zones are showing on the screen and as i hover my mouse cursor to different zones the active zone gets highlighted i'm gonna go ahead and release my mouse now that snaps into zone one if i open another window click with my left mouse click and then hold on to the shift key and now i'm gonna drop this into zone two and i can open up another chrome window drag that into zone three so it's really simple to do now going back to the launch layout editor here notice that next to each template there is a pencil icon that lets us edit okay so if i click on the edit button you see that we have the option to increase the number of zones and since this is a column template if i increase the zones that means i'm adding columns but if i go to the rows template increasing the zone means i'm increasing the number of rows and we could also um specify the space around the zones right so that's the margins right now it's set to off but if i turn it on now there's 16 pixels essentially sitting between the different zones creating a bigger margin between the two i like to just keep this off okay let me go ahead and save that now if none of these templates satisfy your needs then we can create our own custom templates as i have done below the way we do that is to click on this create new layout we can give the layout a name i'll just leave the default and then we have two approaches that we can take in creating new layouts first is the grid approach and the second is the canvas approach let's start with the grid approach okay you'll notice that we have three zones defined already and we can click and drag these handles to resize the zones and also as i move my mouse cursor around you see this blue line when i click on it it splits the zone into two i click on it into two sometimes the bar isn't vertical sometimes it's horizontal the way you toggle between the two is if you hold on to the shift key you can go from vertical to horizontal and you can split the way you want okay now we have too many zones here if i want to merge the different zones just click and drag your mouse to highlight the different zones that you want to merge let go of the mouse click and you have this option to merge zones so i'm going to click on that now we have it merged now if i wanted to save this i'll hit save and apply i'm going to cancel out of this go back to create new layout and let's choose the canvas approach to see what that does click on create and now you have this one zone defined and it's also showing the resolution now this is nice because now i can drag i want to make this let's say 19 20 by 1080 so i can share this window in a teams meeting now it does take a little bit of effort to get it exactly right 1920 1080 there we go and then i can drag it to position it where i want now if i click on the plus button i can create additional zones again what's nice about this approach is that i can have overlapping zones uh but i'm gonna put this to the side here create a third zone put it here and i'll hit save and apply now if i double click on this and let's say i'm going to start a teams meeting and i want to share this web browser window i'm going to hold down to the shift key drop it into the 1920x1080 zone that we created now i'm going to open up teams meet now start meeting join now get rid of these error messages and now when i share my screen choose the window option and select the google chrome window now you can see the red border around it indicating that this is the screen that i'm sharing and from the point of view of the meeting attendees they're seeing this in a perfect resolution uh aspect ratio they're not seeing the distorted ultra wide screen that i'm sharing now going back to the settings menu here under fancy zones there are a few things that we can customize probably more than i would ever want uh but a few things worth highlighting is the activation shortcut so if you want to get to the different layouts and be able to change from one layout to the next the fastest way to do that is by holding on to the windows shift and the tilde key okay and then from here you can double click on the zone that you want to activate or the layout that you want to activate rather okay but if you don't like the shortcut combination you can hit the pencil icon and you can choose a different one uh alternatively if you go down to the bottom of the menu here uh it says override window snap so i mentioned earlier by by default windows 10 windows 11 they have this windows snap feature that you can activate by holding onto the windows key and hitting the left and right arrow top bottom arrow and it'll snap the window into place we can override this so if i toggle this on then using the window arrow key will let you navigate from one zone to the next define in the fancy zones layout and then another thing you can do is if you don't like the highlight color of the zone you can change it here uh there are a few other things that you can explore so i invite you to do that if you're interested so that's it for today's video thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and for more videos like this be sure to subscribe to my channel thanks and bye for now you

Channel: Andy Park

Views: 125,460

Keywords: Microsoft Power Toys, PowerToys, Fancy Zones, FancyZones, Ultrawide monitor, Ultrawide screen, Share ultrawide screen in Zoom, ultrawide monitor screen share, Ultrawide display screen share in Teams, teams screen sharing, Display aspect ratio, Display resolution, Microsoft, Windows 10, Windows snap, display zones, display layout, display grid

Id: yNM6ZJCoddU

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021