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Personalize the task bar so that you have easy access to the applications and utilities that are important for you.

Quick reference

Personalize the Task Bar

Set up the task bar so it contains the applications and folders important to you and functions in the most efficient way. 

When to use

We personalize the task bar so it's quick and easy for us to see and access frequently used applications and folders. 

Instructions

The task bar is the bar that runs across the bottom of the screen. In Windows 11, the task bar is centered and provides quick access to applications, folders, and information that is important to us. We can personalize what icons we see on the taskbar and change the way the taskbar behaves. 

Pin/Unpin Applications

The taskbar comes with default applications already pinned to it. We can unpin those items and pin our own applications. We recommend pinning applications we use regularly to the taskbar and unpinning anything we don't use often. 

  • Click the Start button or press the Win key. 
  • Click All Apps. 
  • Right-click on an app and click More. 
  • Click Pin to taskbar. 

To remove an application from the taskbar, right-click on the application and click Unpin from taskbar. 

Taskbar Settings

We can personalize the taskbar further including how the taskbar behaves from within Settings. 

  • Right-click on the taskbar. 
  • Click Taskbar settings. 
Taskbar items

We have a selection of taskbar items that we can choose to show or hide: Search, Task view, Widgets, and Chat. Notice the toggle sliders next to each. Toggling all of these On will show the application on the taskbar. Toggling off will hide the application from the taskbar.

For example, if we don't use Microsoft Teams much, we might want to toggle off Chat so it's not taking up valuable room on the taskbar. 

Taskbar corner icons

We can show or hide icons that appear in the corner of the taskbar (next to the date and time). We may already have icons in here for things like volume, power, and WiFi. We can specify if we want to show icons for the Pen menu, Touch keyboard, and Virtual touchpad. Toggle them on to show them on the taskbar. 

Taskbar corner overflow

We can choose which icons appear in the taskbar corner, all others will appear in the taskbar overflow menu.

Due to limited space on the taskbar, the taskbar corner can only display so many icons. Choose the icons that are of most importance to you to show in the taskbar corner and everything else will show in the overflow menu. We click the up arrow to show all items stored in overflow. 

Taskbar behaviors

We can customize the way the taskbar behaves. 

In Windows 11, the taskbar is aligned to the center by default. However, if we prefer the taskbar to be aligned to the left like in Windows 10, we can change that in Taskbar alignment. 

We can Automatically hide the taskbar. If we select this option, the taskbar will minimize and disappear from the screen when it's not in use. To show the taskbar, we simply move our mouse to the bottom of the screen. 

Show badges allows us to see how many unread messages we have on taskbar apps. For example, maybe we have Outlook and Teams pinned to our taskbar. If we show badges, we will be able to see an indicator on the app in the taskbar that shows how many unread messages we have. 

Toggle on the Share any window from my taskbar option to share any window with others. 

We can quickly show our desktop by pressing Win+D. Alternatively, we can toggle on Select the far corner of the taskbar to show the desktop. This means we can click to the right of the date and time to show the desktop.

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  • 00:04 Another thing we can personalize in Windows 11 is the taskbar.
  • 00:08 Because the taskbar is such a fundamental utility when we're working
  • 00:13 with our system.
  • 00:14 It's where we go to access our most frequently used applications.
  • 00:18 And as we've seen when we boot up windows 11 for the first time,
  • 00:22 it contains a number of default icons.
  • 00:24 And we went through all of those in previous lessons.
  • 00:27 Now I've also showed you how you can pin applications that you use
  • 00:32 frequently to the taskbar.
  • 00:34 But what we haven't had a look at is how we can unpin applications.
  • 00:38 And this is as simple as it sounds.
  • 00:41 For example, if you remember, we pinned the settings application to the taskbar.
  • 00:46 Now, if I decide that I want to unpin that, I can simply right click, and
  • 00:51 I have the option unpin from taskbar.
  • 00:53 As soon as I do that, it's going to disappear.
  • 00:56 Aside from pinning items to the taskbar,
  • 00:59 we can personalize the task bar in other ways.
  • 01:02 So if we right click our mouse anywhere on the task bar,
  • 01:06 notice we can choose taskbar settings.
  • 01:08 Once again, this is just going to jump across to that main settings area but
  • 01:13 we're going to get to the exact place that we need.
  • 01:16 If we take a look at the breadcrumb trail we can see that we're in personalization
  • 01:20 and taskbar.
  • 01:21 So in this top section,
  • 01:22 we can basically customize the icons that we want to see on that taskbar.
  • 01:27 And these are the default icons that you get when you load up Windows 11 for
  • 01:32 the first time.
  • 01:33 As you can see I have all of mine toggled on.
  • 01:35 So that means I can see in the taskbar, search, task view, widgets, and chat.
  • 01:41 But maybe I'm not a Microsoft Teams user.
  • 01:44 And so I have no real need to have chat on my taskbar.
  • 01:48 So what I can do is toggle that off and notice it immediately disappears.
  • 01:54 Now, I'm going to toggle that back on because we want to use that a bit later on
  • 01:57 in this course.
  • 01:58 But it's definitely worth going through and just toggling off things
  • 02:01 that you don't really use just to save a little bit of space.
  • 02:04 The next section down is taskbar corner icons.
  • 02:08 Now, what exactly does that mean?
  • 02:10 Well, it's referring to all of these icons that we have down in the taskbar on
  • 02:14 the right hand side.
  • 02:15 As I mentioned earlier, we can see various different pieces of information.
  • 02:19 I can see my OneDrive, I can see things like my volume,
  • 02:23 my power status, the date and the time, so on and so forth.
  • 02:28 Now, you can see in this section it's giving me the option
  • 02:31 to add more items to that corner area.
  • 02:34 For example, if I'm somebody who uses a stylus, maybe this is a touchscreen device
  • 02:39 I'm using, maybe I want to have a little icon that shows me when I'm using my pen.
  • 02:44 Now, I currently have that toggled on but I'm using a PC and
  • 02:47 it's not a touchscreen and I don't have a stylus.
  • 02:50 So I don't really need that, I'm going to toggle it off.
  • 02:54 What about touch keyboard?
  • 02:55 Always show the touch keyboard icon.
  • 02:58 And you can see that I do have that touch keyboard icon showing.
  • 03:02 Now, I don't use a touch keyboard so I'm going to toggle that off,
  • 03:05 it's going to remove it from that corner area.
  • 03:07 And the final one here is virtual touchpad.
  • 03:10 Again, something else you can toggle off or on.
  • 03:13 So you can make minor changes to the icons you'll see down here.
  • 03:16 Now, the next section is taskbar corner overflow.
  • 03:20 There's only so much space that we have for
  • 03:22 icons in this bottom right hand corner.
  • 03:25 If we have too many it's going to start to clash with the taskbar.
  • 03:28 So Microsoft really had to choose a cutoff point and say,
  • 03:32 no more icons in this little section.
  • 03:35 But what if we have lots and lots of things toggled on?
  • 03:38 What happens to those icons if they don't fit into this area?
  • 03:41 Well, they go into what we call the taskbar overflow area.
  • 03:46 Which we can access by clicking the little up arrow in the bottom corner.
  • 03:49 And you can see there are my overflow icons.
  • 03:52 So I have a full full version of teams down here.
  • 03:55 And this is where I can toggle off and
  • 03:57 on what I want to appear in that taskbar corner overflow.
  • 04:01 So window status update.
  • 04:03 I can see I've got that toggled on, and if you remember, we need to restart our
  • 04:07 device to install those updates that we were looking at earlier.
  • 04:10 And I can see that down in this corner.
  • 04:13 I know a restart is required so
  • 04:14 I'm going to toggle this off which removes that icon from down here.
  • 04:18 So go through this and customize what you want to see in that corner.
  • 04:22 Now, the final thing we have is taskbar behaviors.
  • 04:26 And this is where we can come to change our taskbar alignment.
  • 04:29 If you remember, I said right at the beginning of the course when we were
  • 04:33 talking about differences between Windows 10 and Windows 11,
  • 04:37 Windows 10's taskbar was kind of over on the left hand side.
  • 04:41 Whereas in Windows 11, we have it centered.
  • 04:45 Notice here, taskbar alignment center.
  • 04:48 Now, this is where we can come if we want to change that and
  • 04:51 move it back to the left.
  • 04:52 If I click that, take a look at what happens.
  • 04:55 It puts it back over to that left hand side and
  • 04:57 makes it look a little bit more like Windows 10.
  • 05:01 So again, this is personal preference, I like mine in the center.
  • 05:05 Another thing we can do is to automatically hide the taskbar.
  • 05:09 Now, this is something I do all the time.
  • 05:11 Because I record a lot of tutorials and videos,
  • 05:14 I don't like to have my taskbar showing when I'm not using it.
  • 05:19 So if I'm doing videos on maybe an application like Excel,
  • 05:22 I want Excel to take up the whole screen in my recording,
  • 05:25 I don't necessarily need to have that taskbar showing.
  • 05:28 Now, because I'm doing a Windows 11 course,
  • 05:30 I'm permanently showing my taskbar because we're looking at it all the time.
  • 05:34 But if I wanted to, I could say automatically hide the taskbar,
  • 05:38 which gets rid of it.
  • 05:39 And then it only appears when I pull my mouse down to the bottom of the screen.
  • 05:43 As soon as I move away, it hides it again.
  • 05:46 So that can be quite a nice one depending on what you're doing.
  • 05:49 We have some other options that we can modify in here.
  • 05:52 So things like showing badges, and
  • 05:55 that relates to showing little icons on the taskbar over the application.
  • 06:00 For example, if I have the mail application open and
  • 06:03 it's showing in the taskbar, if I've got unread messages it's going to show
  • 06:08 a little icon that says 2,3,4 depending on how many are unread.
  • 06:12 If we don't like that we can choose to deselect this option.
  • 06:15 And the final one that's really interesting is the bottom one here,
  • 06:19 select the far corner to show the desktop.
  • 06:21 Now, if we have quite a few things open but we want to quickly just get to our
  • 06:25 desktop, there are a couple of ways we can do it.
  • 06:28 We can press the Win key and D which will minimize everything down.
  • 06:33 Alternatively, if we have this bottom option selected,
  • 06:36 it means that if we need to get back to our desktop quickly,
  • 06:40 if we hover our mouse all the way over to the right hand side of the taskbar sort of
  • 06:44 next to where I have this little crescent moon icon,
  • 06:47 if I click where we have that line, that's going to show my desktop as well.
  • 06:51 Which is pretty cool.
  • 06:53 So Windows Key D or click to show your desktop.
  • 06:56 Those are the options that you have when it comes to personalizing your taskbar.

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