Just as you did last time, you can get to these settings by right-clicking on a blank area of the taskbar, and selecting, “Taskbar settings.” We stopped at showing the seconds in the system tray clock. Today, onto, “Combine taskbar buttons and hide labels.” Which is how to arrange your buttons on the taskbar. Choose the setting that suits you best. Next, “Combine taskbar buttons and hid labels on other taskbars”, I set these both to, “Always.” Just my preference, you can change as you wish.
The next one listed as “Help with taskbar” and then “Changing taskbar color” will take you to the web and explain how that works. This again is your preference.
Now, let us get into some fun things you can do with the taskbar. First, I need to let you know that unless you jump into the Registry of Windows 11, which is not for beginners, you could change the location of the taskbar. Like moving it to the top, left, or right side of your monitor. This was easy in Windows 10, but not in Windows 11. I suggest until Microsoft allows this in a simple way, you ignore the longing.
This is next tip is easy, but has several steps. You press the Windows key to open the menu, find Chrome (or any application in your application list Chrome is a sample), or you can just start typing “chrome”, when you see it, right-click on the icon. One of your choices will be “Pin to taskbar” left-click it, and you are done. By-the-way, I should mention here that will work for almost every app on your computer. Also, if you have a program on your desktop, you can usually right-click them and pin them to the taskbar. Another way to pin an app to the taskbar is to right-click on an open app’s icon, which is in the taskbar, then pin it while it is open. You can also use “Pin to start” which will put the icon in the main start menu. Do not do that too much as it will overcrowd your start window. Of course, that is just my opinion and you may certainly do so if you wish. To remove a pinned item, right-click on it and select, “Unpin from taskbar.”
Another neat thing in this area is if you want to rearrange the icons in the taskbar, click, and drag them to a new position.
Here is a neat trick for creating a shortcut to anything on your computer and then pinning it to the taskbar. Since some things will not pin to the taskbar, this is a well-designed workaround. For instance, say you have a webpage you would like to visit every morning. Like your bank. First browse to your financial institution’s webpage, once it opens, click in the URL address bar at the top of the page and select it. Right-click and copy it.
Next, on your desktop, right-click on your wallpaper then choose, “New,” then on “Shortcut.” In the area labeled, “Type the location of the item:” type the word “explorer” with one space after it. Now paste the website after the single space. So, if my bank was bank.com, I would have, “explorer https://bank.com”, without the quotation marks. Then click next. On this screen, type anything you want to name this shortcut. Click “Finish.”
To make it look better, change the folder icon to something else by right-clicking on the icon on your desktop, choose “Properties”, now “Change Icon…” in the center lower part of the window. Choose one of the supplied icons, then OK. You are done, now drag the icon from your desktop to the taskbar and drop it. You can now even delete the desktop icon and access that site with one click.
You can do that last one with most anything on your computer, even if you want to put a document on your taskbar. Get its location and paste that like you did the bank site. Have fun!