DEMO: Navigating and Quick Access

A lot of what we do on our computer is access a lot of different applications and navigate around on those applications and on our computer, so let's talk access. I'm on a Windows machine.

Quick Ways to Access a Program

Let's start by talking about accessing a program — quick ways to access the program. Let's say I want to access the media player. What I'm going to do is click on the start button right here, and up at the top I see some programs here but not all the programs, and then I see some documents. I don't want to access a document, I want to access the media player, and I don't see it pinned here at the top. So I'm going to go to All and scroll down till I find the media player, and there's the media player. I can click on it and then open it up.

There's a few steps there that I have to do. How can we shorten this? For one, I could just click on the start and type in "media player" and hit enter, and then it pops up. I do this for a lot of programs — programs that I don't access as much but I want to be able to quickly access, I just do a search for it.

The other way is I can find that program, whether I type it in or go to the all programs there, and I can right-click on this and say Pin to Start. Then the next time I open up the start menu it's actually pinned in here. I can organize these — there are ways that I can move this around and organize them — but if I want just to access this program, I can hit start now and I can hit media player and just do everything with the mouse click away. So that's pretty fast.

I personally don't use the start menu a lot. I just use the search feature, and I use the taskbar. Anything that I launch often, I use this taskbar. So another thing I can do is right-click on this media player and say Pin to Taskbar. This too I can organize — the taskbar in the way I want. Usually the things I use the most are all the way to the left and things I use the least are all the way to the right. But now here's the program that I can launch this media player, and that's a fast way, using this taskbar.

Either of those I can undo just by right-clicking and saying Unpin from Taskbar, and then I can click in here and choose media player and unpin from the start menu. So I can either pin it or unpin it.

Quick Links to Websites

There are times when my program is online. What I can do for those, let's say I want to make a quick link to maybe techknowsurge.com. So I open up that website, and what I can do is create a link to this just by clicking and dragging this over to my desktop and dropping it there. Now I've got a quick link to open up a homepage. I can call it what I want — maybe I call it Awesomeness — and now I can open up Awesomeness with just the click of the button. For now I'm just going to delete this, so throw it in the bin and empty the recycle bin.

Accessing Documents

Let's take a look at accessing some of my documents quickly. I can click on the start menu and I see some recommended documents here. If I want to see more I can click on the More button and see a list of all the documents. Or what I could do is, let's say I want to open up the folder here, and I can go to the documents, and there's some of my documents in there. Maybe pictures, maybe music, wherever I want to go.

I'm going to go ahead and navigate to some sort of location here, so I'm going to open up the users, demo users, and I'm going to go to Desktop. One thing that I can do to navigate through these folders as well is I've got this what's called a breadcrumb, so I can jump to the local disk. If I want to go back to the local disk, now I'm back into the local disk. If I hit this back arrow it takes me back to the last place I was at, which was the desktop. So I can jump back and forth between these different locations here using the breadcrumbs and the arrows here. Or if I want to go back a level I can hit back and go back a level, and it just brings me back a folder level. So there's some ways I can navigate through my folder structure to find the documents that I'm looking for.

Shortcuts and Pinning a Folder

I'm going to go back to the documents, and let's say my Shapes folder — I want to actually create a shortcut to here. I can click and drag this with the right mouse button and then let go and Create Shortcut Here. Now if I want to open up and jump directly to that folder, I could just double-click on this and go directly to that folder.

The other thing I could do with my Shapes is I can right-click on this and say Pin to Quick Access or Pin to Start. Let's go ahead and pin to start now, and I click on the start menu here and we can see that it's pinned here. So this is a way that I can quickly access this folder.

The Run Line and Keyboard Shortcuts

Let's take a look at a couple programs I like to use often. I'm going to close out of these windows here and I'm going to use a run line. If I click on the start menu and type in "run," here's a program that I'll use to type things in. For instance, if I want to get to this file location, this file share here, then I can do that. But what I want to do is quickly get to there, and all I need to do is hit the Windows R button and it'll bring up that run dialogue box. So that's a quick way of doing that.

Another thing I can use this for is there are some commands I can put in there. If I want to get into the command exe, I can type in CMD and hit enter, and then it'll pop up with a command prompt.

Another program that I use often is for what's happening on my computer — I want to see the task manager. I can hit Control Shift Escape and it'll bring up the task manager. That's a quick way to open up task manager.

Typing an Emoji

Next up, a quick way to type in an emoji. I need to bring up a program that would actually allow me to type an emoji, so I'm going to bring up Chrome here, and in the search bar here I'm going to hit the Windows button and then a period. Or I could also hit Windows and then a semicolon. Either way, this brings up the emojis, so if I wanted to use an emoji and put that in there, type that in. That's a quick way to access your emojis on a Windows machine.

Locking Your Machine

The last thing we're going to do is a Windows L. When you walk away from your machine you should lock your machine. We'll see how this works, because I'm remoted into here, so I'm going to hit Windows L, and it locked up my whole machine here — not just the computer that I was on that I was remoted into. So that's a quick way to lock your machine.