Rather than clutter up your Windows desktop with endless shortcuts, and files, that ends up looking a little like a cluttered kitchen drawer, with your desktop picture lost in the background - you can easily add your most used programs to the pop-up menu that appears on your screen when you click your Windows button on your keyboard, or by clicking the "Windows" button on the very bottom left of your desktop.
Your Window's start pop up menu is accessed by clicking on the 'Windows' icon on the left bottom of your computer screen. You may not know, this menu is highly customisable, with the ability to move shortcut tiles, add more shortcut tiles, resize tiles, and with some tiles you can make them 'Live', such as a News website shortcut, or a Weather shortcut, which will show a snippet of live information.
How to re-position Menu Tiles - simply left click on any of the many buttons on the menu, and while pressing on the left mouse button, move the mouse cursor on the screen, you will see the tile you have selected will move with your mouse, making it very quick and easy to re-position tiles. If you wish to see your most used menu options you can simply re-position you most used shortcut tiles to the top. See below an example of commonly used tile shortcuts after being re-positioned to the top.
How to Resize Menu Tiles - to resize your shortcut tiles, right click on the tile, and you will see an 'options' window pop up beside the button, select 'resize', then select the size you would like to change the menu tile to. Some shortcuts allow for a 'wide' or a 'large' size button too. In this example below, 'This PC' is a medium size, 'OneNote' is a Wide size, and 'Excel' is a small Size, and the Weather button is a 'Large' size. The large size is particularly useful when you turn on the 'Live Tile' Option.
How to 'Turn On' the Live Feature of Menu Tiles - some menu tiles have a 'Live' option feature, where the tile can display 'live' real time information, such as your calendar events, emails, breaking news, real time financial data, weather and more. This gives you a very quick and easy way to review information at a glance. It is very simple to turn on and off. Right click on the tile and select 'Turn live tile on', and as long as you are connected to the internet the tile will display 'live' information. In our example below, we turn on the 'live' feature of the 'Weather' tile:
Below is an example of a fully customised Windows Menu, in which most used programs are one click away, this menu also gives a quick overview of 'today' with live tiles showing weather, news, calendar and financial information all in one glance:
This concludes our Tutorial on how to customise your Windows Start Menu.
If you are experiencing computer issues, or maybe your start menu is not displaying or is freezing, then it is time to seek some help.
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