Start (23H2)

Start in Windows 11 is significantly different than that in Windows 10 and previous Windows versions. As with the Taskbar, Start is now centered onscreen by default, and for the first time, it is a floating window, and not a menu or full-screen experience.

As with previous Windows versions, you can open Start by clicking the Start button on the Taskbar or by typing WINKEY or CTRL + ESC.

Get to know Start

Start now offers a simplified user experience with two main sections–Pinned and Recommended–plus a Search box at the top and User account and Power menus at the bottom. As a result, it looks and works differently than before. And some features you knew from the past are hidden or no longer available in Windows 11.

Where did it go?

Start in Windows 10 was quite different, with a more complex layout that included a navigation pane, an All apps list, and a live tiles area. But only some of these elements are still available in Windows 11.

Navigation pane. Two of the items from Windows 10 Start’s navigation pane–User account and Power–are available at the bottom of the new Start menu. The other links you previously used to access Settings, File Explorer, and various folders can be added to the Windows 11 Start menu by customizing it as described later in this chapter.

All apps. The All apps list is available by selecting the “All apps” button at the top right of the Pinned section.

Live tiles. Microsoft no longer supports live tiles in Windows 11. It’s the beginning of a new era.

Pinned

Microsoft and your PC maker populate the Pinned area with a collection of useful and promotional app shortcuts. And this area can scroll in place if the number of shortcuts it contains is too large to display all at once in the available space. You can scroll between its various pages by using the little controls on the right, or by using your touchpad, mouse, or keyboard.

All apps

To access the full list of apps that are installed on this PC, click the “All apps” button. All apps takes over the Start window and looks and works much like the All apps list in the Windows 10 Start menu.

Recommended

By default, the Recommended area displays two different types of items: Recently installed apps and recently accessed documents, images, and other files.

More recommended

To access a longer list of recent apps and files, click the “More” button next to Recommended. Recommended takes over the Start window and provides a much longer list of those content types.

Search

A browser-like Search box appears at the top of Start so that search results appear below your search, much as they do in web-based search engines. As with the Search functionality in Windows 10, Search in Windows 11 helps you find and launch installed applications, documents and other files, settings, and other content, and it is personalized for your sign-in account (a personal Microsoft account or an Entra ID-based Work or school account) to provide results from your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Outlook data stores, and Bing.com on the web.

Start switches to the Search experience when you select the Search box or start typing.

To be clear, you don’t need to select the Search box to start a search. Just start typing while Start is open.

We examine Search in more detail in the Search chapter.

User account options

In the lower-left corner of Start, you will find a button representing your user account. When you click it, a small pop-up menu appears with choices for changing account settings, locking the PC, signing out of this account, or, if available, switching to any other accounts that are configured for use on this PC.

You can change or edit the user image displayed on this button by opening Settings (WINKEY + I) and navigating to Accounts > Your info.

Power options

In the lower-right of Start, you will find a “Power” button that displays options like Sleep, Shut down, and Restart when clicked.

Customize Start

Start offers a few customization options, some of which are available directly in Start and others that can be found in the Settings app.

Customize the layout

By default, the Pinned and Recommended areas take up identical amounts of space, though the number of rows of icons you will see in each will vary according to your display’s size, aspect ratio, resolution, and scaling settings. But you can optionally choose a layout that provides “More pins” or “More recommendations” instead.

To do so, open the Settings app (WINKEY + I) and navigate to Personalization > Start. You will see three layout options at the top: More pins, Default, and More recommendations.

These choices work as expected. If you select “More pins,” for example, Start will provide more space for the Pinned area and less for Recommendations.

And if you select “More recommendations,” it will provide more space for Recommendations and less for Pinned.

Customize Pinned

The Start menu’s Pinned area works a lot like the Live tiles area from the Windows 10 Start menu, though now it can only display app shortcut icons and not live tiles. But you can still add (“pin”), move, or remove app shortcuts and organize them into folders as needed.

Add a shortcut to Pinned

To add an app shortcut to Start, select it anywhere in the system–including the All apps view in Start–and choose “Pin to Start.”

Shortcuts pinned to Start appear at the bottom of the Pinned area. So you may need to scroll down to find a newly-created shortcut.

Move a shortcut

You can change the location of any item in Start’s Pinned area by dragging it to a new location.

To move an icon to the top of Pinned, right-click it and choose “Move to front.”

Remove a shortcut from Pinned

To remove a shortcut from Start, right-click it and choose “Unpin from Start.”

If you remove too many shortcuts from Pinned, it’s possible to introduce an empty space between Pinned and Recommended. That’s right: the Start in Windows 11 is so unsophisticated that it cannot auto-fill that empty space.

Create a folder

The Windows 11 Start menu lets you create folders full of app shortcuts. To do so, drag one app shortcut onto another. Then, you can drag other app shortcuts into the newly created folder as needed.

You can move app shortcuts to new locations in a folder just as you do with the Pinned section in Start. You can also drag shortcuts out of a folder to remove them from the folder.

Rename a folder

To rename a folder, click it to open it in place, click the folder’s name, and type the name you prefer.

Remove a folder

To remove a folder, you have to manually delete each app shortcut it contains or drag/move them out of the folder and back to Pinned, one by one.

Customize All apps

The All apps view works as it did in Windows 10 in that it provides an alphabetical list of all of the apps installed on your PC.

It even uses the same semantic zoom feature that lets you click a letter header in the list (like “A”) to view a grid of letters so you can quickly navigate further down the list.

There is only one option in Start settings that impacts the All apps view: “Show most used apps.” It’s disabled by default and determines whether a “Most used” section appears at the top of All apps, above the “A” section.

Customize Recommended

By default, the Recommended area in Start displays your most recently added apps and most recently opened documents and other files together. But you can show only one or the other–or neither–using the following two options in Start settings:

Show recently added apps. Enabled by default, this option determines whether recently installed apps appear in Recommended.

Show recently opened items in Start, Jump Lists, and File Explore. Enabled by default, this option determines whether recently opened documents and other files appear in Start (and in Jump Lists and File Explorer’s Home page).

In case it’s not obvious the Recommended area will be empty if you turn off both of the options noted above.

That’s right: Windows 11 Start is so unsophisticated that it will not remove the Recommended area if you disable everything it can display. Instead, it will waste the available space with an empty Recommended area.

You can’t change the location of the items in Recommended. Instead, this view acts as a Most Recently Used (MRU) list, where the most recently accessed items are at the top. But you can remove individual items you don’t want to see there: Just right-click one and choose “Remove from list.”

You can also remove items from the More recommended view the same way.

Move Start (and the Taskbar) to the left side of the display

By default, Windows 11 centers Start and the Taskbar items and app shortcuts onscreen. But if you prefer to left-align these items to more closely resemble the Windows 10 look and feel, you can.

To do so, open Settings (WINKEY + I), navigate to Personalize > Taskbar, expand “Taskbar behaviors,” and change the Taskbar alignment option from “Center” to “Left.”

Display system folders in Start

Unlike Start in Windows 10, Start in Windows 11 doesn’t display any system locations by default. But you can choose to display buttons for several system locations–including Settings, File Explorer, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos, Network, and many others–to the left of the Power button in the lower-right of Start.

To do so, open Settings, navigate to Personalize > Start, and click “Folders.”

On this page, select the system location(s) you want to display in Start. Then, open Start to view the change.

Use the Quick link menu

If you right-click the Start button on the Taskbar, the Quick link menu–which some mistakenly call the “power user menu”–appears, as was the case with Windows 10.

This menu, like Start, is somewhat streamlined compared to its predecessor, but it still provides access to legacy management interfaces like Device Manager and Computer Management as well as more updated system tools like Task Manager, Settings, File Explorer, Search, Run, and so on.

You can also open the Quick link menu by typing WINKEY + X.