From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Customizing the Action Center

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Customizing the Action Center

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- [Instructor] On your Windows computer, on the keyboard, press the Windows + A keyboard shortcut. Up pops the Action Center. Now you probably don't know the name for this handy location. I call it quick settings, but the name is Action Center, which is very helpful to remember its keyboard shortcut Windows + A. If you click on the system icons on the notification area, you'll also see the Action Center. The top three items are wifi, Bluetooth, and airplane mode. On a laptop, you would see a battery indicator at the bottom of the Action Center, plus more settings are available if you page down. The wifi and Bluetooth icons are the handiest for me, so I like keeping them up here on top for easy access. Clicking the left part of the button turns the feature on and off, and be careful turning off Bluetooth, especially if you have a Bluetooth mouse, because you lose mouse input. Then you can use the arrow part of the button to choose, say a new Bluetooth device, or for wifi, to access a new wifi network. These icons are very handy, and like many things in Windows, the Action Center is your area to customize to match your workflow. In Windows 10, an edit icon appears in the Action Center, which allows you to add and remove icons. Sadly, this feature isn't present in Windows 11. What you can do, however, is to prioritize those tiles, those buttons that you use most often by dragging their icons. For example, on this desktop computer, I will never enter airplane mode, and I can't think of any reason why or would I even want to. So I can drag this icon down to the second page and leave it here. And say I want one of these icons up top, mobile hotspot, I can drag it up and set it right here. Or the nightlight feature, that would be better on a desktop computer. If you find this type of dragging imprecise, move the other icons around to set up things the way you want, rather than dragging them between pages directly. So you can move these like this, which is easier than dragging between the screens. It's sad that the Action Center can't be edited further, I would like to remove icons I know I would never need on this computer, and I might want to add a few that I don't know are available. But for my desktop configuration, this works well. Give the Action Center a try on your computer, set it up to work best for you.

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