cgs-intro-win-10

Introduction to Windows 10

Getting Started with Windows 10 In this clip, we'll look at getting started with Windows 10. Well welcome to the series of clips, and we're really excited to be able to share with you some of the tips and features that make Windows 10 great. Of course, one of the reasons that's really made Windows 10 such a success early on is the fact that it's been offered as a free upgrade on any devices currently running Windows 7 or Windows 8. Now Windows 10 brings a lot of new features and of course it's available on many more devices than ever before. Now just as in previous version of Windows, Windows 10 is available on various versions. Most individuals will be interacting either with Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro versions. And in these clips, while I'll be using the Windows 10 Pro version, there's not too many differences in the clips that we'll be dealing with between Pro and Home. Now in the workplace in larger companies you may see Windows 10 Enterprise and you won't see very many differences between Enterprise and Pro. And finally, there's a Windows 10 Education Edition, and again, Education is very similar to Enterprise, which is also similar to Pro, so most of the higher end features that may be useful to a business or a large organization are found in these three versions; however, the core features that will be the focus of this series of clips really will apply to any of these editions. Now Windows 10 is really a universal operating system, so it's going to be running on a lot of other devices as well. Windows 10 mobile will be running on smartphones. Even devices like the Microsoft HoloLens and the XBOX One gaming system will be running versions of Windows 10. Fitness devices like the Microsoft band and even devices that don't exist yet will be able to run a small version of Windows 10 IoT. So seeing Windows 10 running on so many different devices and platforms really makes for a flexible environment. We'll be able to enjoy consistent experience and we can share our settings and media across many different devices. Now in this video series, our focus is really on the experience you're going to have with Windows 10 running on a desktop, laptop, or tablet. The clips are divided up and grouped with thought given to levels of expertise and interest, but by all means, feel free to jump back and forth, view the clips that are of interest to you, and then go back and watch the ones that might help you pick up some new tips as well. You're sure to find lots of useful information in this series of clips on Windows 10. In this clip, we've just looked at getting started with Windows 10. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Understanding the Lock Screen In this clip, we'll look at the lock screen. The Windows lock screen fulfills an important function. When your device has been secured or locked, it will require some means of authentication to access your device again. Now this is enabled by default, and I recommend against disabling this unless you have a unique situation. Now a lock screen can present a static image or it can actually display a slideshow, and we'll talk more about that in a moment. The lock screen can present you with some good information to have at your fingertips. Here you can see the time, the date, I can see I have emails, and I can see I'm connected to a network. Selecting or swiping the lock screen will reveal my sign-in screen. After signing in, I can go and look at my settings, which control how my lock screen will behave and how it will appear. The quickest way to get to my lock screen settings is simply to type in lock in my search box and here you can see Lock screen settings. This opens up the settings app to the personalization section. Under Lock screen, you can see I can choose the overall appearance of my lock screen and down here I can control which of the apps will present information by means of my lock screen, so here you can see I have my calendar, I have email. Now under screen timeout settings, you actually have a setting that lets you determine how long the lock screen will appear before the screen goes dark or shuts off. Now returning to the personalization section and lock screen, you can see the overall appearance is determined by this drop-down under background. Now currently it's using just a specific image, a picture, I can also select a slideshow and in some devices you'll see Windows Spotlight, which is a feature that Microsoft has made available that will actually push out unique images, kind of random images. As time goes on and you indicate that you like some of the images that appear, you'll see this start to personalize, and you'll see similar images based on your feedback. Windows Spotlight is a service and it's designed to highlight or feature new apps, maybe help you discover things that are in the store, it can also present you with tips, it can even help you to see apps that you already have on your device that maybe you've never used. Now Microsoft has included some attractive images you can use for your lock screen here, but you can choose your own, maybe you have some family pictures or a pet that you want up here. You just use the browse to select the picture that you want to have on your lock screen. Now if you'd like your lock screen to present a slideshow, just select Slideshow. You'll see your choices alter a bit, and by default, the Pictures folder is included in your slideshow. Now in my case, I don't want to have just all my pictures randomly show without any organization or thought. So what you can do is you can have a folder that you set up ahead of time with specific pictures you'd like to be in your slideshow. Select Add a folder and then simply point it to the folder that you'd like to add. Select Choose this folder and now I have two folders that are listed or albums that are listed for my slideshow. In this case, I'm going to select Pictures and then remove it. Now when my device goes to lock screen, I'll see a slideshow using the specific images I've selected for my slideshow. Now one last thing to be aware of if you do select Slideshow and you look at screen timeout settings, the screen will never actually go dark. The slideshow will continue playing until you unlock your device or actually power it down. In this clip, we've looked at the lock screen. Thank you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Understanding Microsoft Accounts In this clip, we'll look at understanding Microsoft accounts. Using a Microsoft account may well be a new concept to you. Microsoft accounts were first introduced to computer users with Windows 8. Now Microsoft account is simply an email and a password. They've been set up with Microsoft. You may have created a Microsoft account when you first logged into a Windows 10 device or you may have created a Microsoft account in the past using things like XBOX or One Drive. Traditionally, on computers you would use a username and a password and these would be setup locally on that device, so that username and password were really only good for that particular device. Now with a Windows 10 computer, you can still use a local account, but there's a lot advantages to using a Microsoft account. First of all, with a local account, if you ever lose your password or forget your password, you're pretty much in trouble because there's not really any built-in mechanism to reset or recover a forgotten password. With a Microsoft account, if you ever forget your password, there are built-in mechanisms that help you recover a forgotten password. Another big advantage you'll find with a Microsoft account is that it's not local to a single device. You may have multiple devices you use with your same Microsoft account. And that brings up another important feature; synchronization between devices is part of using a Microsoft account, so you'll see things like your personalization settings, your preferences, things maybe you've created on one device such as a music playlist will appear on other devices as well, important services, such as One Drive, which is a cloud-based storage system that is included with a Microsoft account allows you to save pictures, music, and documents on one device to your One Drive, and then retrieve them from another device. Windows 10 includes a personal assistant and search tool named Cortana, which requires a Microsoft account to work. So does having a Microsoft account on your device require you to always have an internet connection? No. The first time you use your device and sign in, you need to have an internet connection to authenticate to verify the password, but after that, that password is cached locally and your device will remember the correct password if you use your Microsoft account later and you don't have the internet connection to check the password. Of course, there are a lot of services and synchronization that won't function properly or at all without an internet connection. So here's the important question. Should you be using a Microsoft account on your device? Well unless you have unusual circumstances or very specific needs, I recommend you use a Microsoft account. You may not appreciate all of the benefits and enhancements that it brings to your device, but as you get to know your Windows 10 device better, you'll certainly appreciate the benefits of using a Microsoft account. In this clip, we've looked at understanding Microsoft accounts. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

The Start Menu Using the Start Menu In this clip, we'll look at using the Start Menu. The Start Menu has received a lot of thought and attention in as far as how it functions and appears in Windows 10. A lot of elements will be familiar to you from Windows XP, Windows Vista, or 7. It also includes elements from Windows 8. When you open your Start Menu, you'll see it's basically broken down into two sections. Off here to the left, you have a navigation area and to the right, you'll see tiles. Now obviously with the tiles, they kind of grab your attention because many of them are live tiles. Live tiles are designed to provide with information from within the app. So at a glance you can get important information, such as weather or news and you'll also see things that are designed to catch your attention and encourage interaction with these apps. This area of tiles can be organized and rearranged to suit your needs, and we'll look at how to do that in other clips. Here to the left, you have a navigation area and you'll see things like most used apps, you'll see recently installed apps, and toward the bottom of the navigation area, you see a few shortcuts. The Start Menu can be resized by simply selecting and dragging one of the borders and there's a few key settings with the Start Menu you should be aware of. If you open your Settings app and select Personalization and here we're going to look at the Start options, so you can choose to include most used apps or also recently added apps. I recommend you leave those on. You can choose to have your Start Menu just appear as a full screen menu, and in another clip, we'll look at tablet mode and we'll see that's how that actually works by default. You can also choose to use Jump lists or not on your Start Menu. I recommend you leave that on. We'll look at Jump lists in another clip as well. Finally, you can choose which folders appear on Start. If you select that, you can see File Explorer and Settings are on by default. You can also add other key folders, such as documents, or downloads, or maybe some of your libraries, so that they're right there at the Start Menu. We're actually going to look at a lot of the features of the Start Menu in more detail through quite a few different clips, so I encourage you to watch those as well. In this clip, we've looked at using the Start Menu, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using All Apps In this clip, we'll look at the All apps section of the Start Menu. When you open your Start Menu, you'll see the navigation portion located here to the left and at the bottom of that, you'll see the shortcut for All apps. Selecting All apps will actually show you a complete list in alphabetical order of all the apps and applications that have been installed on this device. This list is comprised of modern apps that have been purchased through the app store and desktop applications that have maybe been downloaded from the internet and installed or installed from a disk. Navigating the All Apps menu is pretty straightforward, you basically scroll down the list; however, this list will grow with time, you'll install more apps and applications, and you'll see that this list can get pretty long to navigate. You can quickly jump to a separate portion of the menu by simply selecting a letter and then selecting another letter to jump to that portion of the alphabetical listing. You'll also notice that many apps and applications have icons that appear here; however, you also encounter a fair number of folders. Now folders that appear in the All apps menu are simply containers, they may contain several shortcuts or maybe just a few and you'll find it to be pretty easy to expand the folder to see the contents. Now folders are generally associated with desktop application installs and system applications. For example, if you opened the Windows accessories folder, you'll find a lot of familiar Windows desktop applications that appear here that perhaps you didn't notice the first time you looked through the alphabetical list, and unfortunately, because they're in this folder, they don't appear in the alphabetical listing. At any time, you can select Back to return to the normal navigation area. In this clip, we've looked at the All apps portion of the Start Menu. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Pinning Apps to the Start Menu In this clip, we'll look at pinning apps to the Start Menu. As was considered in a previous clip, when you look at the All Apps Menu, you're looking at a comprehensive list of everything installed on your machine, so you could the applications you need; however, some applications you use more often really should be pinned to your Start Menu. Pinning apps to the Start Menu is a very straightforward process. Simply locate the app in your All Apps menu, and while you could right-click it and select Pin to Start, you can actually simply select and then drag and drop the application to create a new tile. Notice that the icon changes to a tile once it's over the tiled section of the Start Menu. Simply locate it and drop it. Now applications that have been pinned to Start still will appear in your All apps menu, they don't disappear from that list. And applications can also be unpinned very easily. Again, select a tile in your Start Menu, and right-click it, and select Unpin from Start. Many modern applications have live tiles enabled, but you won't actually see this behavior until they're pinned to the Start Menu. In this clip, we've looked at pinning apps to the Start menu. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

The Taskbar and Accessibility Using the Task Bar In this clip, we'll look at the Windows Taskbar. The taskbar has long been an essential feature of Windows and while Windows 10 doesn't present a lot of changes to the taskbar, the taskbar itself is home to some new features. Starting here on the left, you have your Start button, which opens your Start Menu, you have a search field, which can also be represented by an icon, and you have a few icons that are already pinned there. So just like your Start Menu, you can pin apps to the Start Menu, you can pin apps to your taskbar as well. That makes them highly visible and easy to launch. By default, you'll see a few that are already pinned here. For example, you have your task view, Microsoft Edge, File Explorer, and the Windows Store. And here off to the right, we see our notifications area and you can launch the action center from here. We'll look at those in other clips. When you have open applications running on your device, you'll see a narrow horizontal bar at the bottom of the icon on the taskbar. Hover your cursor over one of these icons to get a live thumbnail preview of that open application. If you have multiple instances, you'll actually see multiple thumbnails for each open window. Now there are a few things you can do to customize the taskbar. You can relocate it by selecting and dragging the taskbar to a different border of your screen, and you can select the exposed edge of the taskbar to resize it. Right-click an open area of the taskbar and select Properties, this will bring up the taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box and you'll notice there's a few things here that you can select. You can choose to lock the taskbar, this prevents it from being relocated or from being resized, you can select auto-hide the taskbar, this will let the taskbar actually hide, giving you more screen real estate, you can use smaller taskbar buttons, so if you are someone who likes to pin a lot of aps to your taskbar, you might be able to fit more on using the small taskbar buttons. You can also use the menu here to relocate where the taskbar appears on your screen. Select the edge of the screen that you prefer from the drop-down menu. Notice the checkbox here refers to the Peak tool, this refers to a small sliver of a button that appears at the extreme right end of the taskbar. By default, this is enabled and if you hover your cursor over this button, notice how all of your windows go transparent and all you see is the outline. It's a quick way to see something that might be saved on your desktop. Finally, if you have multiple displays, you may see additional options here as well. For example, you can have your taskbar appear on each display and you can have the taskbar show active icons for all applications on all windows or just ones that are unique to that display. In this clip, we looked at using the taskbar in Windows. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using the Notification Area In this clip, we'll be looking at the notifications area. Now the notifications area refers to the region to the extreme right of your taskbar. There you'll see icons that can provide you with status and notifications. Some of these icons are visible, some are hidden, and it also includes the new action center, which is a new feature with Windows 10. We're going to spend some more time looking at the action center in a separate clip. Now the specific icons that will appear in your notifications area will vary from one device to another depending on the hardware and some of the software that's been installed. Some icons are pretty standard across all devices, for example, your network connection, you'll probably see a clock with a date here. Notice this icon, Show hidden icons, that actually reveals some of the hidden icons that are just kind of kept out of site to avoid some of the clutter you'd have if all of these notification icons appeared here. As you can see in this particular device, I'm using a laptop and there's a battery status indicator and I can also see an icon for my touchpad, so these wouldn't appear on a desktop computer. Some icons appear here to indicate there's a need for some attention, maybe for an update as in this case. And icons can change to notify you of different situations, maybe things are all okay, or in this case, my One Drive is telling me that there's a problem and One Drive isn't functioning correctly. All of the icons that appear in your notification area generally have a context menu that can be revealed when you right-click on one of the icons and these icons can even change depending on changing circumstances. For example, if I plug a USB device in, I'll have a new icon letting me control the USB device. Now you have a lot of control over what appears here and how it appears. Managing the icons that appear in the notification area is handled through the settings app and the easiest way to pull that up is probably by typing in notifications in your search box, select Notifications & actions settings, and here at the top we see quick actions, that refers to the action center, which we'll look at in another clip, and notice here below it says Select which icons appear on the taskbar, and turn system icons on or off. So if we select System icons, first of all, we can see the basic system icons that should appear on any Windows 10 device and these can be selectively turned on or off, so that they're always visible or not. Now in addition, you can select which icons appear on the taskbar, in other words, which icons will always be visible. So maybe with a laptop, you want to see the power status all the time, so you could turn this on and now it wouldn't be hidden icon, it'll be always visible right on the taskbar. You can scroll through your list of icons and you can select which ones you would like to see on the taskbar and which ones you prefer to remain as hidden ones that you can pull up when you select Show hidden icons. In this clip, we've looked at the notifications area. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using the Action Center In this clip, we'll look at the action center. Now the action center is without a doubt one of the more important new features that Windows 10 brings to users. The action center is actually located within the notifications area, which we've looked at in another clip. So when you look at the action center, you'll see it's basically divided into two sections. You have the upper area, which is devoted to notifications that come from apps on your device, while the lower area has a series of buttons, these are called quick actions, basically they're important settings that may affect how your device functions. You can manage those settings right from the action center. Some of these actions we'll actually look at further in other clips, but basically things like screen brightness for a laptop or tablet, controls for your Wi-Fi, airplane mode, to quickly make a One-note, all of these things can be triggered right from the action center. Now if you look at your notifications, you'll see they're grouped by the app that generated those, so you may see several different groups of notifications. And what's nice about this feature is that notifications may pop up on the screen, you might see a little banner notification alerting you to something, but generally these only appear there for a second or two and then they disappear. We'll just let you go back and look at some of the notifications that perhaps you've missed. Another nice thing from this action center is that you can actually take action on these without opening the app. So for example, I can see emails that have come in, I can expand it if I want to see a little more information about that email. Once I'm done, I can simply click the X and now that notification is gone. As you can see, this listing is pretty dynamic, so new notifications can appear at any moment. Now you can take actions with notifications individually or you can just close an entire group of notifications once you've reviewed them all. Now some apps that can send notifications to the action center may be a nuisance, you may not want to see those notifications. There's a couple ways you can handle that. From the action center, if you right-click on a notification, you have two options, you can turn off notifications for this app or you can jump to the notification settings within the settings app. So if this was an app that I considered to be a nuisance and I didn't really want to see notifications maybe from a game or something that was casual, I could turn those off and I would no longer see those in the action center. So let's look at how we could control a little bit more in detail, the kind of notifications that appear in the action center. Now I could select Go to notification settings, but I'm going to take advantage of a quick action down here and actually open the settings app, of course, you could do this from the Start Menu as well, and I'm going to go to system, which includes notifications. And under notifications and actions, this lets me manage some of the quick action buttons that appear there, the top four that actually appear in that group of quick actions. If I select this, I can actually choose from some of the other available actions. Now there's some important global settings that affect notifications here, for example, I can tell Windows I don't want to be notified about tips, I can also tell it that I don't want to see app notifications at all, which would turn off all of the notifications, I can tell it I don't want to see notifications on my lock screen, I can also control whether alarms, reminders, or VOIP calls like Skype appear on my lock screen. And here's an important button to be aware of, I've seen this happen before, someone's giving a presentation in a conference room and suddenly on their screen appears a little banner about an email that just came in, so you can actually hide notifications while you're presenting. Now if you go below this, you have more granular control over individual apps and whether they can put notifications in the action center or not. For example, we saw Java throw a notification up in my action center, so with this switch, I could turn off that ability and restrict that app from being able to put notifications in my action center. Now generally when apps install this ability to put notifications in the action center is on by default, so you may find it useful from time to time to go through there and maybe turn some of those off, especially, if you notice they're becoming something of a nuisance. In this clip, we've looked at the action center. Thank you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Ease of Access Controls In this clip, we'll look at the ease of access controls included in Windows 10. Ease of access or accessibility controls are nothing new to Windows. They're especially designed to help people with disabilities interact with their computer, but even people that struggle with maybe vision or hearing issues, will find some valuable tools here. To enable ease of access tools, open your settings app, and then select ease of access. Here you'll find several tool categories. Now I'm not going to be able to take the time to go through every little detail and feature here, but just to give you a general overview. First of all, under Narrator you can enable and then manage some of the characteristics of the voice that's used to narrate. You can select your voice and if you've installed other language packs, you'll actually find additional voices available for many of them. You can fine tune characteristics such as speed or pitch and under sounds you hear, you can turn on and off when the narrator would kick in for different things that are taking place on the screen. Finally, under cursor and keys, you'll find some additional tools that help you to fine tune again how the narration is triggered on the screen. Under magnifier, you can enable the magnifier manually. This will give you a small toolbar that can be used to manage it as you work in your computer. You can also enable the magnifier to start automatically with Windows. Under Tracking, you can have the magnification follow the mouse cursor or follow your keyboard. High contrast provides some specially compiled themes to make it very easy to distinguish things that are taking place on the screen. As you select one of the high contrast themes, you can see in the preview window how that will appear on your screen. Closed captions is a new feature with Windows 10 and it's designed to work with the movies and TV app. When using the movies and TV app, you can oftentimes rent or purchase videos that include closed captions. From the closed captions pane here in ease of access, you can manage how those closed captions will be presented. Under font you can make changes to the size, the color, the appearance, and affects that are taking place, as well as under your background and window you can make further adjustments as to how your background would appear behind the captions and whether transparency would be enabled or not. Again, above you have a preview so you can see exactly what you're going to get. Keyboard provides you with a few additional tools. You can enable an on-screen keyboard. You'll also find many other options here with regard to your keyboard, features like sticky keys or enabling tones and sound effects when certain actions take place on your keyboard. On your mouse you can manage the pointer size and color. You can also enable mouse keys and this lets you use your number pad as a mouse. And finally, under other options, you'll see some additional things that can be used that apply to ease of access, for example, animations may make some people sensitive with all of the movement going on in the screen, so you can disable that here. You can change the thickness of the cursor so it's easier to see on the screen and another nice feature I like here is Show notifications for, this lets you manage how much time is allowed for a banner notification to appear on your screen. The default is 5 seconds, but some people like to give it a little bit more time just to make sure they can read those. In this clip, we've considered a brief overview of the ease of access tools included in Windows 10. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Getting Started with Windows 10 Apps Understanding Windows Apps In this clip, we're going to look at understanding Windows apps. This clip is designed to kind of get you familiar with some of the terms that will be used throughout this series. Windows apps are modern apps that are installed through the Windows store. Desktop applications really meet more of the traditional criteria, they've been downloaded from the internet, they're installed, or maybe have an installation disk to install this on your device. It may make a difference if it's a 64 or 32-bit application that you download. Both Windows apps and desktop applications are really applications. So sometimes you'll hear the term applications used in reference to both of these categories. Generally when I use the term desktop application or Windows app, there's a reason I'm being very specific. Windows apps are designed to work very efficiently with Windows 10. In fact, the installation and updates are managed right from the Windows Store. Windows apps install very quickly and they uninstall just as quickly. Another thing you may have noticed with Windows apps is they're designed to keep the content as the focus. So generally, menus are kept to a minimum, the windows will be borderless, and you'll see a lot of consistency in the way menus appear and behave in a Windows app. So what else makes Windows apps different? Well Windows apps are designed to meet certain design criteria that Microsoft has set out for developers that want to write applications that work with Windows 10. Now these design characteristics don't just include the overall appearance of the app, although, that certainly is a factor, but it also includes the way they interact with the operating system and with the hardware on your device. Window apps are designed to run sandboxed, which means basically that they kind of run in their own little enclosure and any tasks that need to be handled outside of that enclosure, outside of the app, such as printing or sending something to the display are handed off to the operating system. This takes a lot of load off of developers since they don't have to know every piece of hardware variation that a computer might have to run a Windows app. Because of the way a Windows app is installed in this sandboxed environment, Windows apps don't make changes to the operating system. In other words, there's not a lot of registry changes or special files that are installed somewhere in the Windows operating system, although, there's a lot of benefits to the way these modern Windows apps install. Because of their nature, it's very difficult for some malicious individual to try to damage or change your computer. You also find that when a system is being overtaxed, a Windows app will simply crash rather than have the whole operating system come to a screeching halt. So Windows apps are really designed to let the operating system manage them as far as how much resources they're using, how much of an impact this is having on your device's performance. You'll also find that Windows apps meet a certain design standard that affects the overall appearance, so things like menus and other characteristics of apps are going to be pretty universal whether using them on a tablet, a desktop computer, or a Windows phone. So let's just take a moment and we'll look at some of the basic characteristics that you'll find in a Windows app. Now any app or application that's running in Windows will have a title bar. These title bars generally will have all the same controls to minimize, maximize, or close a window. In some cases, you may see a back arrow. You'll also see hamburger menus, another common feature that's been introduced with Windows 10. These hamburger menus are designed to expand and reveal additional controls when needed. When not in use, they minimize so they are not obstructing your view of the application itself. It's also common to see panes that may open from the left of the right side of the application, these may include other settings or other configurations. Some Windows apps will have a command bar and this could often be revealed if you're using a mouse by right-clicking, you may then see additional commands pop up either from the top or bottom or both. Windows apps often use an ellipsis, the three little dots, as you can see here and this also can be expanded, it's letting you know there's more options or more commands available. In this clip, we've looked at understanding Windows apps. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Opening Applications In this short clip, we'll look at opening applications. Now as you're no doubt aware, you can pin your favorite apps or desktop applications to your taskbar, to your Start Menu, you can even have shortcuts on your desktop. Opening pinned applications is a simple matter of selecting or giving a single-click to open that application and of course with shortcuts that are saved to your desktop, you'll need to double-click to open those. One important tip to take away from this clip is finding and opening applications that are used less often. As we've already considered in other clips, it's not too difficult to locate apps that are installed on your device using the All Apps Menu; however, you'll find it to be very practical to get used to the idea of using the search box to locate your applications and apps that aren't pinned. Let's say for example, that I need to use the Paint desktop application. I know where that's located at. I would have to go to All Apps, Windows Accessories, and then I could find the Paint application. Look how much easier it is just to simply type in Paint, and there it is. Well let's say you've been told that you need to open a command prompt on your computer to perform some task. Well again, instead of looking for that, simply type in command and there you see the command prompt application. Now this same tip applies if you're looking for settings. Let's say I need to do something with my display settings and here you can see different places where settings that affect my display are indicated. I can open up my settings app to display settings and this icon lets me know this is actually a control panel applet that controls display settings. In this clip, we've looked briefly at opening applications. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Closing Applications In this short clip, we'll look at closing applications. Now if you're a long time Windows user, you're very familiar with the title bar and its important tools including the X to close your application. So for those using Windows 10 devices, in desktop mode, you'll find that this continues to be most practical way to close your applications. Now Windows 10 has a lot of features that really are designed to work well with touch screen displays. In another clip, we're going to look closer at the idea of tablet mode, but basically a touchscreen display with Windows 10 will normally run in tablet mode, which changes the way that open applications work on your device. When your touchscreen device is in the default tablet mode, you'll find that you can simply swipe down from the top of the screen, your finger will catch the app that happens to be open, and as your finger travels down the screen, the app will shrink, and if you continue to drag it all the way to the bottom of the screen, you'll see it moves to the task bar, at this point, the app will close if you release your finger. So a touchscreen device is closing an application is simply a matter of dragging from the top of the display all the way to the bottom and that app will be closed. Now if you have multiple apps visible on your display, just swipe down where the app that's open happens to be, make sure your finger catches that app to drag it down and close it. In this clip, we've looked at closing applications. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using the Windows Store In this clip, we'll look at using the Windows Store. The Windows Store app is a very important part of Windows 10. The Windows Store app was first introduced with Windows 8, but it's been really improved for Windows 10. In addition to finding new apps and games for your computer or device, you could also purchase or rent music, movies, and TV shows. You'll see applications have been divided up into featured apps, you can also browse top charts for different categories, and as you scroll down through the collections that are grouped together, you can also jump to genres or categories. The Windows Store makes it easy to see the price, many apps are free, others will have a price, and you can see the price is presented right up front. Reviews are an important part of the Windows Store, so right away you can see how well received or how well reviewed an app is by the little stars that are indicated next to the app. If something catches your eye, go ahead and select it, you'll be able to zoom into that app, and you'll get more details, a description, you'll see screenshots, if you scroll down, you'll find more in-depth reviews, and then down here in the fine print, you'll find additional information about the app, perhaps rating-related, you'll also see an indication of how much size this will take on your device, you'll also find helpful links that might take you to the developer's website or places where you can find more support information for that particular app. To return to browsing, you can use the back arrow or you can return to one of the principle categories using the links up above. The Windows Store also provides you with a search tool that helps you search for apps by name or by keywords that appear in the descriptions. Now again, with Windows 10, 2 new features have been introduced, the Music and the Movies & TV sections. Again, you can search through categories and groups of music or you can search for specific artists or songs. Music purchases made in the Windows Store app will be made available in the Groove music app. The Movies & TV section of the Windows Store app allows you to make purchases of movies and TV shows and for many movies, you can actually rent those as well. And of course, content is divided up into the expected categories. You'll see top lists, you'll see featured, and you'll see different categories grouped as well. Now purchases made through the Windows Store app will be made available on your devices through the Movies and TV app. We'll look closer at the purchasing process and how you can manage your purchases in another clip. In this clip, we've looked at using the Windows Store app. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Purchasing in the Windows Store In this clip, we'll look at purchasing in the Windows Store. Now in a previous clip, we looked at the Windows Store app and how you can look for and find apps, music, and of course, video and TV content. Now making purchases, even if they're free, requires a Microsoft account. Even if your device is using a local account, you'll be prompted to log in or provide credentials before you can complete a purchase. When you're looking at an item in the store whether it's an app or some type of media, you'll be presented with a price. Now while most things you find in the store are going to be reasonable priced, you might find some things there to be a bit more expensive, so be very careful with your Microsoft account and your credentials. Now to actually make a purchase, select the item in the store, as you can see here the price is presented. Now if this is a free app, it will be installed automatically. If a price is indicated, the default behavior is to request credentials again. This is again to prevent unauthorized purchases; maybe you have a young one that gets a hold of your device and decides they want to buy all of the season for their favorite animated TV show. Now after providing your credentials, you'll be presented with your default payment method. As you can see here, it's pretty clear how much is being charged and the method of payment is indicated. Now to finalize this purchase, I just need to select Buy at this point. The purchase will be made using my default payment method. I'll receive an email giving me a summary of the purchase information as well. In the Windows Store app, you'll see your account is clearly indicated here at the top. Below this, you'll see settings, your account information, payment options, you can review your online history of purchases, you can redeem a code, you can look at your library, and you can review downloads and updates. Now generally, these are updates for apps, but you'll also see Windows 10 updates up here with time as well. If you're like me and you have an account that you use on more than one device, you can go to My Library. This will list purchases you've made with your account that may not be installed on this device, but they may be installed on other devices. Since I've already purchased these, I can download these to my device here as well. To install one of these apps on this device, I just have to select this arrow, the app will download, and it will be installed. Now music and movies and TV purchases are handled a little differently. If I go to music, I'll see up at the top, My Music or My Movies & TV, both of these links will open the corresponding app to play those purchases, and here again, a Microsoft account is needed to play your purchases in these apps. So if you're in a device using a local account, you may again be prompted to log into that app with your Microsoft account. Purchases that you have rights to listen to or watch will appear in the app. Here under settings, I can control whether my updates automatically update and also I can determine whether or not I want advertising. In this clip, we briefly considered making purchases in the Windows Store app. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Exploring Basic Operations Understanding Tablet Mode In this clip, we'll look at understanding tablet mode. Now in other clips we made reference to tablet mode and perhaps you're wondering what is tablet mode. It certainly is a new term for long time Windows users. Well tablet mode is a new feature with Windows 10 that allows your device to dynamically change the way it interfaces with you. Now Windows 8 was really designed to work with tablets and touchscreen interfaces. Now obviously, many computers don't have touch interfaces and it can be a pretty awkward way of working with your desktop computer. So Windows 10 was designed to work well with desktop hardware, they have a keyboard and mouse, while at the same time working well with tablets that use touch. Now there are actually quite a few devices out there that I referred to as hybrid devices or two in one, so it may be a tablet with an attached keyboard and sometimes you'll see these keyboards can either detach or they fold behind the tablet and in doing so, they're disabled. That allows you to use the screen itself as a touch interface. Now Windows 10 can see this difference and recognize when there's hardware such as a keyboard that's available for interface or not. When it detects that the keyboard is no longer present, it will automatically switch the device to tablet mode knowing that touch is now going to be the preferred method of interaction. It's really a pretty slick transformation. Now you can also manually make this change and you can fine tune how tablet mode works for your device. Let's look at some of the settings involved. First of all, from the Action Center you'll see a quick action button that's labeled tablet mode. By enabling tablet mode, you'll see quite a few changes automatically take place. Any open apps will now be full screen by default, and in this case, you can see how my taskbar lost all of its icons for open apps. Tablet mode also provides some more subtle differences. You may see things are more spaced out allowing for better and easier touch interaction. For example, the icons that are visible on my taskbar have more space between them, so it would make it easier to touch the correct ones just using my fingers. Another thing you'll notice with tablet mode is when you select a search field or a text field, touch keyboard automatically appears. So again, Windows can sense when it needs to have text input provided, that keyboard will appear, and when you select somewhere outside of your text field, the keyboard can go away. Now as I mentioned earlier, there are some settings that allow you to personalize or to fine tune how tablet mode works on your device. If I open the settings app, and I select system, and then tablet mode, notice here that I can make Windows more touch-friendly when using your device as a tablet. Notice that I can manually turn tablet mode on and off from right here. I can also choose the default behavior of my device. When I sign in, in this case, it's going to remember what I used last. I can change that to always go to the desktop or always go to tablet mode, and again, as far as allowing the device to automatically make those changes, I can control that from here, Don't ask me don't switch, Always ask me before switching, or Just make the switch. So if the hardware changes, the computer can actually make those changes for me. Finally, this is one you may want to make a change with Hide app icons on the taskbar when I'm in tablet mode. So again, by default, to avoid clutter, you'll find that your open apps are hidden on the taskbar, this allows you to turn those back on. Now some other observations to be aware of with tablet mode is that when you're in tablet mode, you'll rarely if ever see your desktop. So if you have the habit of saving shortcuts or documents to your desktop, you won't have easy access to those when you're in tablet mode. Another thing is was mentioned is your apps will default to full-screen view. Now that doesn't mean that you can't more than one app visible at a time. In another clip, we'll look at using Snap and this allows you to have more than one app available or visible on your display at a time. In this clip, we've looked at understanding tablet mode. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Connecting to Wi-Fi In this clip, we're going to look at connecting to Wi-Fi. Now we live in a world where we're very mobile, we move around a lot and we expect our devices to be able to connect to the internet. We want to check those Facebook updates, we want to look at our email, we want to connect to the internet. So connecting to Wi-Fi is a pretty basic task. Windows 10 makes it pretty easy to connect to Wi-Fi, it's a pretty straightforward process; however, there are some settings and some features you should be aware of when you use Wi-Fi. By default, in the notification area, you'll see an icon that lets you know the status of your network connections. Now the appearance of the icon itself can change. In this case, I can see that I have a connection right now with an Ethernet cable, if I hover over that, it will tell me I have internet access as well. In some cases, you may see a Wi-Fi connection or you may see that there's no connection at all. Now if I select this, I can see my current connection, but I can also see there are other available Wi-Fi connections. Now I'm connected with an Ethernet cable just to maintain a connection to this device while we play with the Wi-Fi settings. Normally, you only have one connection at a time to your device. So here, I can see a list of available networks to connect to. I'm going to select this one. Notice I have a connect button and there's also a checkbox connect automatically, this lets my device know that I want to remember this connection for future use, and I won't have to put any passwords in the next time. So when I select Connect, it queries the network to see exactly what's needed to make my connection happen. In this case, I need to have a password, so generally in a public area, you'll have maybe in a coffeehouse or hotel, they'll supply their customers or clients with a password. Now in other cases, you may see these networks are public, in other words, no passwords required. They generally have terms of service that you need to accept to make sure you're not going to abuse the connection in some way doing some criminal activity, for example, before you'll have your internet connection. So you may need to open a web browser if one doesn't open automatically, read over their terms of service, accept those, and only then will you have an internet connection. So in this case, I enter my network password, notice there's one more checkbox here before I proceed that says share network with my contacts. Now it's unchecked by default, but you could choose to select this box. We're going to come back and talk about this a little bit later as we're looking at another setting that applies to this. I'm going to select Next. Now another important thing to be aware of it asks do you want to allow your PC to be discoverable by other PCs and devices on this network. Now before you select Yes, you need to be aware of what you're connecting to. If this is a public network like a coffeehouse or a hotel, you certainly don't want other people on the network that you don't know to have access to your device, so you would check No here. Now if you're at home or if you're at work and you want to be able to share network resources like with a homegroup or printers and things like that that might be out there on the network, then you would certainly want to select Yes. So again, this all depends on what you're connecting to. Is it public or is it private? So in this case, I'm going to select No. Now it's going to take my password, it's going to authenticate it, and you can see I'm connected. Now if I select this again, I can see I have a Disconnect button. Down here below, you can see I also have a quick action button. If I open my Action Center, you'll see I have the same quick action button here. As you can see by the color, this is currently on or enabled. So what happens if I select the button? Well this actually turns off my Wi-Fi antenna, so if I select this button, it turns off my Wi-Fi or vice versa, if it's disabled, then I enable it. My Wi-Fi now becomes active. So here at the bottom of the list of available Wi-Fi networks, there's another link here that says Network settings. If we select that, it will actually open up my settings app to the network and internet section and I'll go right to the Wi-Fi pane. Here I can see I have that same on/off switch that my quick action takes care of, so I can turn my Wi-Fi completely on or off from here, and I can see the same list of available Wi-Fi networks. I can see this one says I'm connected, if I select it, I can see the option to disconnect again. So having all these things down on the taskbar certainly makes it a lot easier and faster to work with your Wi-Fi settings. However, from here, I can access two new areas, Advanced options and Manage Wi-Fi settings, so let's look at these. Advanced options is related to the connection I'm currently using right now. So notice it says find devices and content, there's a switch I can turn this on or off, and this has to do with that private or public network setting. So in this case, if I decide this is a private network and I do want to have access to other things on my network or things like homegroup isn't work, this may be the thing I need to do is turn this on. This make my device visible on the network, so other people can connect it and access things I've shared. Below this you see metered connection and this is an important setting to be aware of. The metered connection setting lets your device know that you're connected to a Wi-Fi network that has some kind of a data limit or data quota, so if I'm using my smartphone, for example, as a hotspot and I'm sharing my network connection to my device, the chances are pretty good that I'm paying for my data, so I don't want my device to just start updating everything in the background and using up all of my data. So if I turn this on, that lets the device know this is a metered connection, so it has to be careful how much data is being used, so it restricts applications and even the operating system from making unnecessary updates and it will postpone those until it's using an unmetered connection. And finally, below this, I can see I have specifics about the network I'm connected to, the network's SSID, the protocol, the security type I'm using, the IP address of the router, so this information might be useful if you're troubleshooting with someone. If I select Back, I can go to Manage Wi-Fi Settings. Now Manage Wi-Fi Settings has a lot to do with Wi-Fi Sense, and again, this is a relatively new feature that Microsoft has made available to its devices. So what is Wi-Fi Sense? Well Wi-Fi Sense is meant to make it increasingly easier for devices and people to connect to the internet. Imagine being able to go into a restaurant, use their Wi-Fi, and since you know the password, your device can actually share those credentials with other people you know. If they visit the same restaurant, their device is automatically able to connect. So notice some of the settings here, we have connect to suggested open hotspots, so your device by means of Microsoft may become aware of hotspots that you're in proximity to that you could connect to. Now this is the one we want to look at though, connect to networks shared by my contacts, so if I select on, then when other people have checked that box that we saw earlier to share this network connection, if it's somebody you know, your device can now use that shared information and connect to that same Wi-Fi hotspot. Now below this you can see three checkboxes currently available and this is related to what happens if you check that box. So who do you share your connections with? In this case, I could share them with outlook.com contacts, I could share them with my Skype contacts, or even Facebook friends. And as you can see, I can deselect these, so I don't have to share it with any of those or I can share with a very specific group. I'd like to just quickly address a couple of concerns with Wi-Fi Sense. Some people have been rightly concerned that Wi-Fi Sense may pose a security risk, so just a couple things to be aware of. When Wi-Fi Sense shares information with your contacts, it requires that you be using a Microsoft account first of all to do so, secondly, it shares the information using encryption, so there are not passwords that are just floating around out there that can be easily picked up by some malicious person. Even though the feature is enabled by default, as you've seen, you need to select that option to actually share the information with your contacts and you have control over which contacts it's shared with. And while you may be concerned about businesses or organizations, they can actually disable this feature on their network and they can choose to use security protocols that negate the ability of Wi-Fi Sense to share passwords. So don't be unduly concerned about Wi-Fi Sense. Be discreet about which networks you do choose to share with your contacts and you may be wise to consider the contacts you're sharing the information with. Certainly for a restaurant or for a public hotspot, you're not putting anybody at risk. For your home network, you may be a little more cautious about which contacts you share your information with. If I scroll down a little bit further, you can see that I have a list of networks that my device knows about, that it remembers. Some of these that says they're not shared, some says it can't share. So these are networks that have been shared to my device, while these ones are ones my device knows about, but I have not chosen to share those with other people. So I could share this later or as is the case with any of these, I could tell my device just forget about it and it will no longer remember the password or even if it was a public or private network. It won't have any awareness of that network. The next time it would see that Wi-Fi network, it would be as if the first time. In this clip, we've looked at connecting to Wi-Fi. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using File Explorer - introduction In this clip, we're going to consider the essentials of working with File Explorer. Now File Explorer is a very important application that's built into Windows. It helps you to work with your files and folders that are located on your device or any networks that you may be connected to. Now there's several ways to open File Explorer, the easiest is that if it's pinned to your taskbar, you can open it from there. If you just select the Start button, you'll also see File Explorer listed there by default. When you first open File Explorer, there are some basic features that are important to understand and we're going to take a moment to consider those. First of all, off here to the left, you have an area that's called the Navigation pane. Now the Navigation pane is basically an important tool that helps you to get around quickly on your device or other places you may have access to. In addition, you'll see that there may be more than one way of presenting some of the same files and folders on your device. Now anything that's selected over here to the left, the contents are displayed here to the right. So if I select this PC, I can see some key folders and different drives that are connected to my device are listed. If I select a folder, I can see files and folders that are within that folder. Now you'll notice these arrows over here in the Navigation pane and these allow you to expand or collapse folders to view their contents. Now the contents can be displayed in different ways, for example, this is a detailed view and this gives me columns that I can actually use to sort my information. You can use things like list view or you could use thumbnails, which is helpful when you're looking for maybe images or videos. I'll show you how to change views really quick here in just a second. Above this area, we have the address bar. Now the address bar shows me where I'm at in my navigation. And again, in the address bar, you'll see these same little arrows and I can use those to expand or collapse the contents of those folders, and again, I can jump to those folders right from there. To the left of my address bar, I have a few other arrows that are good to know. I have a forward and backward arrow and these let me step forward or backward in my steps of navigation. The up arrow will let me go up one level in the hierarchy, so if I'm in a subfolder, I can hit the up arrow and jump up to the main folder. This little arrow here shows me the history of places I visited while this File Explorer has been open. And here to the right of the address bar, I see a search field. I can type in a file or folder name or a keyword that may be associated with one of my files and the search will be run in the folder I've currently selected in my Navigation pane. Above this, we have the ribbon. Now we're going to look at the ribbon in more detail in another clip, but I just wanted to show you the View tab and from the View tab, we can control our layout that we see down here below. So besides the Navigation pane and my Main pane that shows the contents of a folder, I can also enable the Preview pane or the Details pane and I can change the layout of the contents by using different size icons, a list, or a detailed view. Now here above the ribbon we have a another important tool that sometimes is overlooked easily and that's the quick access toolbar. Now the choices listed here are related to common tasks within File Explorer. I can enable additional ones here and you'll see the checkmark appears that lets me know that they've been enabled and I'll see there's a button that appears on my title bar. So these, again, are for common tasks that I use maybe quite often, for example, there's several ways you could create a new folder, but the button here lets me create a new folder with one simple click. Finally, down at the bottom we have our status bar. Now the status bar will give me information about the folder I'm in or any files I may have selected and here to the right I have two shortcuts, again, that affect how things are displayed in the Contents pane. In this clip, we briefly looked at using File Explorer. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Snapping Windows to the Screen In this clip, we're going to look at snapping windows to the screen. Snap was first introduced with Windows 7 and you may have used it in Windows 7 or Windows 8. With Windows 10, Snap gets some new features. Snap is designed to help you manage the Windows that appear on your screen. As you can see here, I have a mess of different Windows that are open overlapping one another. Now the taskbar can help me to jump between Windows or I can arrange these in a way that maybe it makes it easy to jump to windows that I want to work with, but you'll find Snap really is useful in Windows 10. Snap works by grabbing the title bar, which I simply select and then I can drag a window around. If I take it to the top of my screen, you can see a faint outline that lets me know that this app will now be full screen. If I take the toolbar and I drag it to one of the left or right sides of my screen, notice the outline shows that will occupy half of my screen, and this is where a new feature snap assist comes into play. The remaining part of my screen could be used by a different app and snap assist lets me choose from available apps that are currently open, and I can simply select the app that I want to use for the rest of the screen. Now with Windows 10 and depending on the display that you're working with, you're also able to snap Windows to the quadrants of your screen. In this case, if I drag the title bar up to a corner of my screen, notice that it now just takes a quarter of the screen and snap assist will again let me select which app can occupy the remaining quarter. Well this way of snapping windows would obviously would be more effective in a screen with a much higher resolution. So even though you may be able to snap multiple applications to your screen, it may not be a very practical arrangement given your resolution. Tablet mode will also will use snap; however, you cannot currently snap applications to the corners of your display. So again, now I'm in tablet mode. If I take my app and snap it to the left or the right, you can see that there is a central border that appears. Snap assist appears again and I can select the app to share the rest of the screen with, and now I can grab this vertical border and drag it left or right to change the percentage of screen that each application will share. You'll also notice that a small vertical bar lets me see which application is currently selected. So I'm going to return the tablet mode and let's look at some settings that affect how snap functions on your device. Here I'm going to type in snap and notice there's a few settings related to snap that appear. Any of these will take me to the system portion of the settings app to the multitasking pane. And here in the upper section you'll see is labeled snap, so this lets me turn some features on and off. So as you can see, on by default is the ability to trigger the snap by dragging the window itself to the corner of edge of your screen. On by default again, is the ability to snap a window to fill in the available space and snap assist is enabled that lets me see what else I could snap next to a snapped window. Now snap also can be used with your keyboard. If you have a selected window, simply hold your Windows key and use your arrow keys to indicate which direction you want that window to snap and generally holding the Windows key and selecting left or right will put it to the left or right side of your screen and then you can use the up and down arrow next to indicate if you want it to go to the upper or lower corner on that side of the screen. Snap works with multiple displays and if you work a little bit with resizing the windows after they've been snapped, you'll find there's quite a few configurations you can come up with, so I encourage you to experiment a little bit with snap and see how it can be useful to you and your routine. In this clip, we looked at snapping windows to the screen. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using the Settings App In this clip, we'll look at using the settings app. The settings app plays a very important role in Windows 10. Occasionally, you may be directed to open up your Control Panel and work with Control Panel applets, but you'll find that gradually through updates, Windows will migrate all of those settings from the Control Panel to the Settings app. Now this is good news because currently it can be rather confusing having two different places to work with the same settings. Throughout this series of clips, I'll refer to the settings app many, many times as specific videos may refer to specific settings. We'll also occasionally go into the control panel to work with settings that are not currently in the settings app. Now the settings app is itself a new feature for many Windows users. You can open the settings app directly from the Start menu. You'll notice that when you first open the Settings app, all of the settings are divided up into categories. Now over time, you'll note I'll get used to where some settings are located, which category they belong to, however, you're not expected to remember where all the different settings are located. You'll find that it's much easier to search for the settings you're looking for. From the search box here, you could find settings, for example, related to display and here even though most of the settings are within the settings app, you'll notice that it does refer you to the Control Panel for relevant settings there as well. Now no doubt you'll find it easier sometimes to just use the search tool right on your taskbar. Here again if I search for display, you'll see an abbreviated set of results no where near as extensive as when I search within the settings app itself. Now when you make changes in the settings app, those changes take effect immediately. There's no need to save or apply your changes. You also may remember from another clip that if we open our action center, our quick action tools down here are basically just shortcuts to locations within our settings app. So you may find it useful to explore a little bit within the settings app, look at some of the different categories, and remember that at any time you can return to the home page of the settings app by selecting the gear. In this clip, we briefly looked at using the settings app in Windows 10. Thank you for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip. https://www.udemy.com/the-ultimate-quickbooks-pro-training-bundle/learn/v4/overview Searching and Surfing with Windows 10 Using Search In this clip, we'll look at using search. Search has always been an important feature of Windows and with Windows 10, search gets beefed up even more. By default in Windows 10, you'll see on your taskbar a text field for initiating a search or you may see an icon of a magnifying glass. Additionally, you can use a keyboard shortcut of the Windows key and S to start a search. Now search uses Bing services, so you'll actually see some information populated here and this comes from some of the MSN apps that also use Bing services. But you'll notice that as soon as you start to type a search query, things start to happen. Now it's important to understand that search results are categorized. So right away you'll see that some search results are either web results or maybe perspective web searches. You'll also see search results from the Windows Store. Generally, these are related to an app that may fit your search criteria. You may also see search results related to documents, folders, applications, or even settings that are on your device. Notice these two buttons down here, these are designed to help you filter your search results. So generally, you're either looking for something that's on your device, so you would select My stuff or something's that out on the internet, so you'd select web. In this case, I'll select My stuff so you can see the search window expands. So now that search has been targeted to the device, I'll see more comprehensive search results. Any applications or settings that match my criteria will show up here, as will file and folder names, but as you can see, there's also quite a few documents, so things that have been tagged or maybe in the contents of the document. If in some way they seem to match my search criteria, they'll show up here. Now notice up here I have a couple more filters. I can sort my results and also I can narrow the scope of my search a little bit as well. Now if at any time I indicate my search is actually in the web, my default web browser will open and it will start a basic web search for the criteria that was provided. If I return to my search window, notice that there's a hamburger menu here, expand that you'll see there's also some settings here. Those are the few things I can manage from settings. Some of these are related to Cortana, and we'll talk about Cortana in another clip. In this case, Cortana's not enabled, so search really is limited to just a basic search tool. As you can see, I could disable online and web searches if I thought that was necessary. And as you can see, there's additional links here as well. Because searches often generate web searches, I can actually control some of the settings that would ensure that adult content is being filtered out, I can also address and privacy concerns I have here, so we'll look at privacy settings also in another clip. And again, I can manage settings related to Cortana and search in general. In this clip, we've looked at using search in Windows 10. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Setting up Cortana In this clip, we'll look at setting up Cortana. Now you may or may not be aware that the name Cortana actually comes from a successful gaming series that was made from Microsoft's XBOX gaming console named Halo. Cortana was a female artificial intelligence character that would guide the hero through his missions in the game series. So you might be wondering what does Cortana bring to Windows 10. Cortana responds to voice commands, so you can actually ask her to carry out different tasks for you. She can interact with your calendar, she can create reminders, and Cortana even brings quite a bit to your web browsing experience and her abilities will only continue to grow. In other clips, we'll look at using Cortana with Microsoft Edge, how to use her as a personal assistant, and even how to use voice commands with Cortana. In this clip, we're going to just focus on how to get Cortana set up. Now Cortana requires a Microsoft account to function. So if you're using a Windows 10 device with a local account and you try to set up Cortana, you'll be prompted to use a Microsoft account. Now if you weren't invited to set up Cortana when you initially signed into your device, you'll be invited to get to know Cortana the first time you use the search tool on your taskbar. And finally, if you've been using your device and you've never set up Cortana previously, you may need to go into your settings for search. So here I'm going to select my search tool on the taskbar and settings. To start the setup process, we'll simply enable the switch here. And notice I have to agree to some terms of use, you can read these over, but basically they have to do with the kind of information Cortana will need to have access to in order to function properly. As you can see, Cortana needs access to quite a bit of your personal information. Now you can go in later to your privacy settings and fine tune some of the things that Cortana has access to, but initially, you have to simply agree to give Cortana access to information about your location, location history, contacts, search history, calendar, etc. Now in this case, I'm using a local account, so as you can see I'm being prompted to convert my local account to a Microsoft account and again there's no way around this if you want to use Cortana on your device. So let's look at setting up Cortana on a device that has a Microsoft account. Again, I start by selecting my search tool and opening up my settings. When I flip the switch to enable Cortana, again I'm prompted to agree to the terms of use, and now I'm invited to provide Cortana with a name, how will she refer to me, and as you can see, that's about all that's necessary. Now Cortana can give you tips as far as how you can interact with Cortana, what things you can ask, what things she's able to actually do, but I just want to take a second and let you see some of the settings that are involved with Cortana and again, how you can fine tune how she functions. To do that, I'll select the hamburger menu again and you can see my options have now changed. To manage Cortana, I need to select my Notebook and the notebook really has to do with everything that Cortana keeps track of. So here I'll select settings, and again, I can enable and disable certain features of Cortana. Now this notebook is actually cloud-based and most of the information that Cortana manages and keeps track of is kept in the cloud. So basically this switch here, if I turn it off, only will turn off Cortana on this device. Notice there's a link here that says manage what Cortana knows about me in the cloud and this is related to information that Cortana may have already gathered about me up in the cloud, so again, this is more of a privacy issue, and we'll have another clip that focuses on privacy concerns with Windows 10. But certainly if at some point you decide you don't want to use Cortana, make sure you do more than simply turn Cortana off. You may want to go up and manage what Cortana knows about you in the cloud and remove that information as well. This switch allows me to trigger Cortana by simply saying hey Cortana when this is enabled, Cortana is always running in the background and is always monitoring the microphone, so if she hears you say those two words, she wakes up. You can see some additional switches here that are enabled by default. Cortana is designed to be proactive, so with this enabled, she can monitor your email, she'll notice things like flight information and she can proactively check the flight status for you and provide you with updates. And this switch allows her to be a little more interactive and personal with you, so she can pop up on her own initiative and try to initiate some interaction with you. Now the next thing you want to look at with regard to Cortana's settings is back at the notebook, notice there's a lot of categories of information that Cortana can assist you with, so you may find it beneficial to look through these categories. You'll find each one has one or more switches that really control what Cortana is able to be aware of and help you manage the kind of interaction you have with Cortana. Based on the things that are in the notebook and the things that she is able to be aware of, when you select the ask me anything search box, you'll see that Cortana can proactively populate that with information that suites your interests. So I encourage you to take a little bit of time, experiment with Cortana, get familiar with some of the tasks that she can perform, and see if Cortana can really be a personal assistant for you. In this clip, we've looked at setting up Cortana. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Surfing the Internet In this clip, we'll talk about surfing the internet. Now with the popularity of Windows 10, there's many users that are really new to the internet, so this may be the first time you're being exposed to some of the information that's out there. So really, much of the information in this clip is designed to help ones that are new to the internet. Now you may have several devices in your home or workplace that are used every day and when you throw in a switch or router, these devices can connect to one another and then you have a network. So whether you're at home, your place of work, or just using public Wi-Fi, when you connect to the network, all of the devices connected to that same access point are part of the same network. Now being connected to a network does not in itself guarantee that you have access to the internet. It's only when your access point has a connection to the internet that your devices can benefit from that internet connection. Now you'll find that on your Windows 10 device, there are many applications that benefit and require a passive internet connection to be able to pull down sports data, or weather, or the latest news stories. Other applications require an internet connection to pull down email, and yet others to provide the latest social network updates. Now besides these passive internet connections that your device may enjoy, we all like to surf the internet. Now by means of the internet, we have access to an incredible amount of information, some of it very useful, some of it not so much. The challenge is locating the information that we need. Now to make this productive, we have a variety of tools at our disposal. There are many different web browsers that are available, some popular choices include Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and of course, with Windows 10, Microsoft Edge has been introduced as the latest web browser for Microsoft devices. In this series, we'll devote a few clips to getting familiar with Microsoft Edge and many of its new features. So regardless of the web browser you use, many basic features are going to be the same across all of those. Now most website addresses look something like this, www.microsoft.com. Now generally, web browsers will assume the www is there, so you can simply type in microsoft.com and it will take you to the website. Now many times when we start browsing the web, we don't know where to find the thing that we're looking for, so that's where we rely on search engines. So when you browse the web, you may start with a popular search engine, you may go with Bing, or maybe Google, or maybe you have your own favorite. Now while there are many different search engines, essentially they all perform the same basic function, typing keywords and launch your search. So let's say we're looking for a new tablet for Windows 10, so tablet and Windows 10 would certainly give me relevant results. Now if I wanted to be more specific and let's say I wanted to look for surface tablets for Windows 10, just by adding the word surface, it really narrows down my results and web browsers generally provide filters that let you further refine your results. And one last tip, something to be aware of is that while search engines vary on how they present their results, how they find the information out there in the internet that they present to you, some results are influenced by advertisers and most search engines will tag these and let you know this is an ad. So hopefully that provided you with some basic information to get you started and surfing the web and I encourage you to watch some of the other clips we have devoted to Microsoft Edge to get the most out of your surfing experience with this new web browser. In this clip, we've looked at surfing the internet. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Using Microsoft Edge In this clip, we'll look at using Microsoft Edge. Well Microsoft Edge is one of the new and exciting features of Windows 10. Microsoft Edge is a new web browser that's been designed to replace Internet Explorer, this was the web browser that has been part of Windows since 1995. Microsoft Edge is a modern app, so it has some of the characteristics of the modern Windows Store apps and you'll see the interface is very clean and minimal, in fact, things like scroll bars will disappear when they're not in use. Even though the interface seems simplistic and minimal, Microsoft Edge brings a lot of features to surfing the internet. Here we have some basic navigation tools, we have an address bar, to the left of that we have forward and backward arrows for our navigation to jump forward and backward, and we have a refresh tool. So this does the same thing as pressing F5 on your keyboard, it basically just queries the website and pulls down a new copy of the website. Now when we're looking at a website, you can see there are again some basic tools off to the right of the address bar. We have reading view and this is a new feature, we'll spend some time looking at this in another clip. Selecting the star allows you to add the current website to your list of favorites. We'll look at saving favorites in another clip. You can also choose to save the website to your reading list. This allows you to come back and read that information later at your convenience, and we'll come back and look at using the Windows reading list app in another clip. Here a little further to the right we have hubs and hubs contain our lists, so basically things that we've added to favorites, histories, downloads, things like that will be found in our hubs. We're going to look at that closer in another clip as well. Here next to our hubs, we have another new tool related to making web notes, and we'll look at that in another clip. And finally, the last tool shown here is share. In another clip, we'll look at how Windows 10 uses share to make information available not just to people we know, but to other apps as well. Now Microsoft thought a little bit about how people use tabs and they've done some interesting things with that. And by default, Microsoft Edge will open with a Start tab and this is designed to offer up information that might be relevant to you, so you'll see your account might be listed here if you're using a Microsoft account, and if you scroll down, you'll see things that are pulled from some of the other apps that your account is associated with. Now of course the + lets us create a New tab and the New tab has its own look as well. It will remember some of the websites we visit most often and they'll appear here by default. Here we have a prominent search field and we can also type in a web address right there, instead of using the address bar, and really in the address bar we can also type in search queries and launch a search from the address bar. Here next to share, we see three dots. This ellipsis is designed to let us know that there's more information, in this case, more actions available. So here under more actions, we can see there are quite a few actions available, of course, we can launch a new window, we can launch a new InPrivate window, so if you're going to be looking at a website or doing some browsing that you don't want to have show up on your computer later, it's a good idea to use an InPrivate window, nothing would show up in our history, there's no cookies or anything that's downloaded to our computer that stays there, and websites aren't able to track you because you're browsing anonymously. Now if this is a website that you're going to do transactions with or that you want it to remember you, then do not use InPrivate browsing. Below that we have our zoom controls, we can zoom in or out, you can also do the same thing holding Ctrl and scrolling your mouse wheel. So if you're looking for something on a web page, you can use Find on page to launch a search, and of course, you can do the same thing by selecting F3 on your keyboard. If you're looking at something in your web browser that you want to print, you can launch print from here. You can also Pin to Start, so you can actually make a tile in your Start Menu for that website. Now F12 Developer Tools are designed to help people that want to work with the code for a website, maybe for troubleshooting, and it's a tool that most people will probably never use. Open with Internet Explorer can be useful because Windows 10 includes the older Internet Explorer for backwards compatibility. So maybe a website isn't displaying information correctly, doesn't seem to be functioning well, you may try opening it with Internet Explorer to see if that doesn't make a difference. You can send feedback back to Microsoft if you are having issues or if there's something you really like. And finally, under more actions we have our settings. Now settings allow us to change the overall appearance of our web browser, we can use a light or a dark theme, you have the options to show the Favorites bar, so maybe you want to save some favorites right up here to appear prominently on top of your web browser. And here we manage the default actions when Microsoft Edge opens. Do we want it to open to a Start Page, would we rather have it open to the New tab page, maybe to the last pages we had when we closed the browser the last time, and finally we can indicate a specific page or pages that we want to open every time Microsoft Edge opens. Here under clear browsing data, we can choose what to clear, so maybe for privacy reasons or maybe for troubleshooting, we are instructed to clear our browsing data. So here we can say browsing history, cookies, cached data, download history, form data, and passwords, and of course if we expand that, we can see there's even more things that can be cleared as well. I'll select back to go back to my settings and here under reading are some settings we'll look at closer in another clip when we look at reading view. So the settings we've looked at here are the most commonly accessed settings. There are advanced settings as well. Now here under advanced settings, there are a lot of switches you can turn on and off and things you can manage and rather than go through all of those, I'm just going to point out a few of those that you may find useful. First of all, under Show the home button, you may have noticed there's no home button by default in Microsoft Edge, so if you're used to that feature and you like to have a Home button, you can enable that and then you can indicate the website that will be your home. As you can see up here to the left of the address bar, a little home icon appears, select that, it takes you right to your home page. If we scroll down a little bit further under privacy and services, you'll notice that there is an offer to save passwords, so if you share your device with other people or maybe you're just very security conscious, you may not want to have that enabled, or at the very least, you may want to manage some of the saved passwords that your device remembers. There's a switch here that's off by default regarding send do not track requests. So a lot of websites will attempt to track your navigation of the internet. They want to know what sites you visit often, so they're able to query your device and get some of that information that helps them to customize some of the things that are presented to you when you visit their website. So if you're like most people and you don't want advertisers to know more about you than they need to, you may want to enable this feature, at the very least, it makes it more difficult for them to try to get that information from your device. Now in another clip, we're going to look at Cortana and especially how Cortana works with Microsoft Edge. So if you enable Cortana on your device as a personal assistant, by default, she'll be enabled in Microsoft Edge. So as I mentioned earlier, you can actually search for things right from the address bar by typing in a search query. Now by default, Microsoft Edge will use Bing for its search engine, but notice here you can actually change the default search engine that's used, for example, you may prefer Google or Yahoo!, so if you open to that web page and then you go to advanced settings, you can select Add New and you'll see that the web page you're sitting at right now shows up as an option. Now this only works if you're actually at a website that works as a search engine. You can then select it and you can add it to possible search engines or you can set it as your default. In this clip, we've looked at using Microsoft Edge. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.

Saving Favorite Websites in Microsoft Edge In this clip, we'll look at saving favorite websites using Microsoft Edge. Saving as favorites the websites you visit often is a basic task in any web browser. In Microsoft Edge, it's a pretty straightforward task. Once you have Microsoft Edge open to the web page you want to save as a favorite, select the star action icon. You'll see there are two choices here, you can save this as a favorite or you can save it to your reading list to read later. In this case, we're saving the website as a favorite. Now you have a couple additional choices to manage your favorites, you can assign this a unique name, so that you'll recognize it easily in your list of favorites, you can also create folders to organize and manage your favorites. So if you save a lot of favorites, you may be able to think of some categories that you could arrange these in folders, for example, wedding photographer or cute kitten videos. Once the name of your favorite shortcut is all set, you can then assign the favorite to a folder that's already existing or create a new one on the fly. Finally, select Add. You'll notice that the star icon now turns yellow and you'll be able to locate the website in your list of favorites in the hub section. In this clip, we've looked at saving favorite websites in Microsoft Edge. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next clip.