Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Windows 10 Favorite Features and Tips and Tricks”.
This video tutorial focuses on the Windows, 10 operating system and specifically we’re going to look at my favorite Windows. 10 features tips and tricks, as I’ve said in the past, I am a big fan of Apple computers, but I’m also a big fan of Windows, computers. I use both almost equally and so in this tutorial, I’m going to focus on a few of the things that I wish. I had that I miss when I’m on a Mac and the first one I’m going to show is called arrow snap, at least that’s its official name. I like to just call it snap, but the idea with snap or Aero snap is that let’s say you have two windows open or two programs open, and you would like to arrange them so that they’re side-by-side.
Now, of course, you could do this the hard way you could just click up at the top and get them in just the right spot. You could then resize them so that you can fit the part that you want to see on the screen, and so you could really spend you know a good 30 seconds or a minute getting this just right, so that you can have these two windows side by Side, so you can easily use them simultaneously. Well, using Aero snap. You can really quickly solve that problem.
The way Aero snap works is you just go to the top bar of whatever program you want to work with and then click on it and hold the mouse button and then pull it to the right or the left. It works either way, but you have to pull it as far off screen as you can once you do, that you’ll notice a transparent rectangle appearing in the center of the screen. You can see it there. Now it’s gone there.
Now it’s back once you see that transparent rectangle, you can let go and notice what it did it perfectly sized this window so that it takes up exactly half of the screen and then it popped up at the left with other windows that I have open. Other programs that I have open and I can choose which one of these I want to have appear at the left – I’m going to go with this one here, so I click on it and now I have two windows perfectly sized. I can read the newspaper here on the left and I can take notes on the right, so the official name of that is Aero snap and I just love it all the time when I’m on a Mac computer.
I go to try to do that and it doesn’t work and I always wish that it would on a Mac now a feature. That’S somewhat connected somewhat related to this. One is, if you want to go back to full screen. Let’S say I want to go back now and use Microsoft Word in just full screen. Well, yes, I could just click this button here to maximize it or you can click on the top bar and push it up to the top of the screen.
Let go and it goes full screen. So that’s a related feature in Windows. 10. Now those two features arrow snap and the top of the screen making something go fullscreen.
Those have actually been around for quite a while going back to Windows 7. So if you have an older version of Windows, this still should work for you. Another nice feature in Windows 10 and in some of the previous versions of Windows, is something that I like to call shake and show. But I think the official name is arrow shake and the way this works is let’s say you end up with lots of different windows open this happens to me all the time I use way too many programs all simultaneously.
I have way too many windows open and the screen gets very cluttered. Sometimes I just need to simplify and, like I said, there’s this feature called arrow shake and the way it works is you can go to the top bar of a program, click and hold on it and then just give it a shake or a couple of shakes And you notice what happened it minimized everything else I had, except for that particular window. So if you look down at the bottom of the screen on the taskbar you’ll see that these programs are still open. I can tell that they’re open because they have a bar underneath them kind of underlining them, and if I put my mouse on them, I get a little preview that pops up, I believe, that’s called arrow peek – is what it’s called, but anyway gives you a peek Into what that window, or that program has going on, but anyway, they’re still open, but they’re minimized they’re out of the way, so that I can focus in this case on Microsoft, Publisher and I can use that without being distracted.
Now, when you want these programs to get back up and be visible again, the way you’re supposed to do that is to go back up to the bar and give it another shake, and they reappear now to be honest with you, the shake and hide that seems To work a little better for me, then shake and reveal shake and show, and so you’ll have to give it a little practice. Sometimes it takes me a few shakes to get everything to come back, but in this case it worked very well and very quickly. Alright, a couple other tips and tricks about windows that I really like, especially in Windows 10, are ways to get to the desktop. So, like I said before, I tend to have way too many windows open, but sometimes I just need to quickly get to the desktop to do that in the lower right corner of your Windows machine. There should be a small rectangular shape and if you click on that in the very bottom right corner click on it, it should hide everything. Everything is minimized down here to the taskbar, and it takes you directly to the desktop you can move things around. You can use the recycle bin whatever’s on your desktop. You can interact with it.
You can click that button again to maximize everything back to the way it was now. Let’S say: you’re typing up a document you’re just busy typing you’re hands are on the keyboard and you don’t want to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse to go down in that corner and click. There is a keyboard shortcut that you can use. Instead and it’s windows D, so just hold the Windows key on the keyboard and then tap D, and that will hide everything and show you the desktop.
That’S what D stands for and then, if you tap it again windows D, it brings back everything that was minimized while we’re talking about keyboard shortcuts. Let’S take a look at a couple, others that are very important and this first one goes way back to Windows, 7 or so, and what it is is it’s a way to show all of the windows that you have open? What you do is you hold the Alt key on the keyboard and then tap tab, and you can see what it does. It gives me basically a menu of, in this case five different programs and windows that are open and I’m just continuing to hold alt and then I’ll tap tab and notice that it highlights a different one. Each time let’s say I want to switch to publisher I’ll. Just tap tab a few times till it stops on publisher and then I’ll. Let go of all keys and publisher. Now is the foremost program that I have active. I can go alt tab again and I can switch back to the edge browser and now that’s at the forefront, so alt tab is really a nice very useful tool.
If you want to take that a step further, you could use a different keyboard shortcut called windows. Tab, if you hold the Windows key and then tap tab, look what it does. It gives you a small version of each of the windows, each of the programs that you have active on your computer. In this case, you don’t have to keep holding the keys. I’Ve released my hands from the keyboard, I’m not touching any keys, and yet all five options are up and available to me now I can select which one to bring to the forefront just by clicking and it comes forward. Let me do that again: Windows, tab. Everything is brought up in a menu, basically for me to choose from, and I can select the one that I want by clicking and it comes to the forefront now. There is another way to get to Windows tab and that’s this button here in the lower left corner.
It’S called task view if you click on that button, it’s just like doing Windows tab to bring up the options, so those are two different ways to get the same results. Basically now one other wonderful thing that you can do in Windows. Tab is notice in the lower right corner once you’ve done Windows tab. It gives you the option for a new desktop, so I’m going to go ahead and click on that new desktop and it’s given me a second desktop.
I could even add a third. If I want to a fourth once I’ve done that I can just switch between desktops by clicking, so this is my second desktop. If I do Windows tab, I can get back to my first desktop Windows tab. I can move on to the third or fourth.
Now, why would you want more than one desktop? Well, one reason is: it helps you to keep things separate, so maybe you’re doing some work at home and you don’t want to get it mixed up with your personal stuff. You could make a desktop, that’s just for your work, related programs and materials. So let’s say I want to use word on this desktop. One way to do that would be to go back using Windows. Tab go back to desktop one and then do Windows tab again and there’s my Microsoft Word document and I can click on that and drag it down to desktop 3. Let’S say, and now it’s available to me there on desktop 3 okay, so this is kind of nice to have different desktops. Alright, two more features I’d like to share with you features that I just love about Windows: 10. One of those is the search in the lower left corner when you click on search. It lets you search windows and you can type in a program. Ok, just typing in google brought up.
Google Chrome and I can click on that to open it up. You can also search for documents by title and also by the content in the documents. Ok, so I can type in quiz and it brought up a file that I have with quiz in the title you can see down across the bottom. There’S also options to search for music, find results in documents, find images just lots of different great search options now the final feature in Windows 10 – that I love that I want to share with you today – is called the snipping tool and the snipping tool really is. I think one of the best features that’s buried in Windows. 10.
A lot of people don’t even know it exists and they would use it a lot. I think if they knew it did exist and what the snipping tool is for is it’s for taking screenshots it’s for taking snapshots of things that you have on your computer and saving those for later, so that you can use them. Let’S say in a PowerPoint presentation or Word document or whatever, so let’s look at it to activate the snipping tool. What you need to do is go down to the lower left corner of the screen and click on the search windows button and then just type in snipping.
When you do that, you should get a result that appears next, just click on it. It opens up – and it’s just this little bar this little toolbar. That appears once you see this toolbar. What you need to do is arrange the screen.
The way you want it to be to take your screenshot. So let’s say I want to take a screenshot of part of this article. Okay, I would just make it look the way I want to make it look and that might include using ctrl ctrl to make the text bigger or smaller. It might involve using this scroll bar to get the part of the article I would like to capture, but once I have it the way I want it to be. I use this toolbar from the snipping tool to click new and notice that the color of the screen changed a little bit. It went kind of milky-white and my mouse cursor has turned into a plus sign at this point. All I need to do is click and drag around what I would like to capture and then just let go of the mouse button and the snipping tool has taken a screenshot of that webpage.
Okay, there’s the screenshot, and now, if I want to, I can annotate on this, I can use a pen to draw on it. I can use a highlighter to highlight different parts of this image. I can delete if I need to delete and then I simply click save snip.
I can save it to the desktop. If I want to or two pictures – and I can change the type of image that it’s saving as if I want to, I could save it as a PNG, yes or I could save it as a JPEG or one of these other options. I am going to stick to PNG and I’ll click Save if I want to. I can change the name, but I’ll. Just click Save and there, on my desktop now is an image that I have taken as a screenshot. Now, if you really like the snipping tool, if you think you’ll use this over and over, I highly recommend the next time.
You start it up to use it. You go down to the taskbar right-click on it and choose, pin to taskbar that way. Once it’s closed from then on, you should have access to the snipping tool, quick access here on the bar, and you can just click on it to open it up.
So those are some of my favorite Windows, 10 tips and tricks and features that I miss when I’m not using windows. So I hope you’ve enjoyed watching this video tutorial and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new video, at least every Monday. .