👩🏾‍💻 🏇🏼 👶 About multitasking: windows under control 🔼 🔓 🎟️

Marat Khairulin, Microsoft expert in Russia, continues to explore the nuances of working with several tasks and talks about combining windows and splitting the screen, about your personal time machine for sites and documents, and about the real benefits of virtual tables.

In a previous post, we wrote about how modern science relates to multitasking and shared small tricks to help focus on one task. And now we want to remind (and someone may be introduced) with useful features that will help if solving your problem requires working with several applications at once.

Switching in the old and new way

Switching between applications is probably what most of us do “on the machine”, and of course no one will be surprised by the Alt + Tab key combination. But if you also press Ctrl (i.e. Ctrl + Alt + Tab) at the same time, this combination will fix the menu with all the windows open on the screen and allow you to select the desired application with one mouse click or by touching your finger (you can also select the window using the arrows on the keyboard, and open with Enter). It may be useful when you have many windows open.

A slightly less well-known, but also classic Windows + Tab keyboard shortcut provides more features than it seems at first glance.

By pressing these keys in the current versions of Windows 10, we find ourselves in the "Task View" section. Here you can not only switch between applications, but also use the “Timeline” and “Virtual Desktops”. By the way, instead of hot keys, you can click on the “Presentation of tasks” button (usually it is located next to the “Start” button) or swipe your finger from the left edge to the center of the touch screen. By the way, if you have a modern laptop - try a gesture for the touchpad: swipe it with three fingers up.

Task Presentation Mode

"Timeline"

The " timeline " appeared in Windows 10 two years ago. It helps you get back to the tasks you previously worked on on your computer. If necessary, you can also synchronize it with other devices with your account *.

For me, the “Timeline” has become a kind of time machine. Work on many projects lasts several days. And if, say, last Friday I worked with certain sites and documents, returning to this project on Wednesday, I can easily restore the picture. I just rewind the scale to the desired date - that same Friday, I will see and be able to open the very sites and documents into which I was then immersed.

Timeline Search

The search on the "Timeline" also helped me more than once. Unlike the usual file search, I can’t search not among all the documents on the device (and there can be a lot of them), namely among those with which I have worked in recent days. You may be familiar with the combination of Ctrl + F, which launches a search in Explorer and in many applications. This combination will work on the "Task Presentation" screen: that is, you can first press Windows + Tab, and then press Ctrl + F and enter the search word to search in the "Timeline".

* Detailed help on the settings of the "Timeline".

Windows 10 virtual desktops

The concept of virtual desktops is far from new. If we talk about Windows, then one of the options for their use was the Desktops utility , which was once (the latest version released in 2012) developed by Mark Russinovich. In Windows 10, virtual desktops are built into the system and help to share task flows and switch between them.

If you have not worked with virtual tables before, imagine the following analogy to understand their logic: you can use several monitors, on each you can open the necessary programs by dividing them by work flows, for example: on one monitor - work with mail and calendar, on the other - work with several Word documents, and on the third - work with the browser and OneNote. At each moment you look at only one monitor (virtual desktop) with its own set of applications. And switching between virtual tables, you seem to be looking from one monitor to another.

Dragging a window to transfer it to the new virtual desktop

You can create a new virtual desktop on the "Task View" screen: press Windows + Tab and drag the desired windows of open applications onto the field labeled "+ Create desktop", and they will be moved to another virtual desktop. You can also create a new, empty virtual table (Windows + Ctrl + D) and only then open the necessary programs on it.

You can “translate your eyes” (that is, switch between customized desktops) by selecting the desired table on the “Task Presentation” screen, but it’s much more convenient to switch using hot keys: Windows + Ctrl + right / left arrows, and 4 fingers on modern touchpads left or right.

Useful multi-application solutions

Now about one more daily necessity - working with several applications simultaneously.

Split screen

The first opportunity that I want to remind you for many years, and in its original form (called Aero Snap) it appeared in Windows 7. In Windows 10, its capabilities were expanded and called Snap Assist. It's about splitting the screen to pin two (and in Windows 10 - up to four) applications.

Snap Assist suggests choosing the second window for docking on the right

To do this, you need to take the application by the very top bar, bring it to the right or left border of the screen until its “shadow” appears on the screen and release it (thereby fixing the first application), and then select the second one in the thumbnails of other applications that appear next to fastening nearby. The scenario is simple, it works for both the mouse and the finger. This can be made even simpler using the Windows keyboard shortcut + left / right arrow keys. This combination is already more than 10 years old, but those who use it for the first time, and now sometimes experience the feeling of “digital magic”.

To curious users, I also remind you that in Windows 10 you can send an application to the “quarter” of the screen by moving it to a corner (or using the additional Windows keys + up / down arrows). When fixing two applications, you can move the border between them, giving some of the applications more space. To select applications for fixing on the screen, you can right-click on their thumbnails on the "Task Presentation" screen.

Window on top

I had quite a few situations where it was necessary to fix the window of one application on top of another (it seems that on TVs this was called the “picture-in-picture” mode), but if you have such a need, I will remind you of the note about two small possibilities.

The mini-mode of the built-in video player (the “Cinema and TV” application, which plays video in Windows 10 by default). Start the video and click on the small button in the lower right corner (Play in mini-mode), the window with the video will be placed on top of all windows.

Window on top video

A similar opportunity, only with fixing on top of all applications the browser window, can be obtained using separate utilities. Once I needed to work on a document, constantly checking at the same time with the website of one online service, and the Always on Top application available on the Microsoft Store helped me out . It is embedded in the Share menu in Edge and allows you to send any site to a window located on top of all applications. I could joke that this option would be great for watching YouTube channels “with one eye” while working, for example, on pivot tables in Excel. But as we discussed in the first note, such multitasking is more likely to hurt both browsing and work.

In this review, I shared some opportunities when working with one or more tasks that I use myself. In the following notes, I will continue the discussion of techniques that will help make our digital life more productive.