Taskbar

Though most of the items it contains are now centered by default, the Windows 11 Taskbar looks and works much like that in previous Windows versions. But it has also been simplified, so some options you may have used in the past are either missing or can be found elsewhere.

Get to know the Taskbar

The Windows 11 Taskbar sits at the bottom of the display, below the Desktop. It consists of several areas, each with its own unique functionality.

Where did it go?

The Windows 11 Taskbar is a lot less sophisticated than its Windows 10 counterpart, and much of its predecessor’s functionality is now missing or harder to find in Windows 11.

Some key missing interfaces include:

Move the Taskbar to another screen edge. With Windows 10, you could move the Taskbar from its default position at the bottom of the screen to one of the other screen edges. This is no longer possible in Windows 11: the Taskbar can only appear at the bottom of the screen.

No small icons. With Windows 10, you could resize all of the Taskbar icons—Start, Taskbar items, and app shortcuts to a smaller icon size. This is no longer possible in Windows 11: the icons only support a single size.

Taskbar icon groups. The Windows 10 Taskbar could optionally display multiple windows from a single application as separate Taskbar icons. This is no longer possible in Windows 11.

Quick Launch. Windows 10 supported a vestigial feature called Quick Launch, which was a toolbar with icons for legacy features like Control Panel. Quick Launch is no longer available in Windows 11.

Toolbars. It’s not just Quick Launch: While Windows 10 let you optionally display and create toolbars, this functionality is no longer available in Windows 11.

Lock Taskbar. The Windows 10 Taskbar supported a Lock/Unlock toggle that would prevent or allow you to move icons around, respectively. This option is not available in Windows 11. Instead, it is always in an unlocked state.

Taskbar context menu. When you right-clicked a blank area of the Windows 10 Taskbar, it would display a long menu of options. But this menu is gone in Windows 11: instead, you will see a small context menu with just two options, “Task Manager” and “Taskbar settings.”

Here’s a quick rundown of the major Taskbar areas from left to right.

Widgets

The Widgets icon displays the weather forecast and sits at the far left side of the Taskbar. If you mouse over or select this icon, the Widgets interface opens.

Start button

The Start button is used to open the Windows 11 Start menu.

You can also right-click the Start button to display the Quick Access menu, which provides access to a handy list of technical and legacy Windows utilities.

Taskbar items

By default, Windows 11 displays four so-called Taskbar items—Widgets, Search, Task view, and Chat—the last three of which appear to the right of the Start button.

Pinned app shortcuts

In addition to the aforementioned Taskbar items, Windows 11 comes with several default app shortcuts that let you quickly launch often-used apps from a readily-available interface. Microsoft provides the first three—File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Store—and your PC maker can add two more. So what you see here can vary from PC to PC.

A> As with previous Windows versions, you can remove any and all default Taskbar items and app shortcuts; only the Start button is required. And you can, of course, add your own shortcuts and determine the positions in which they appear. This is discussed in Determine which items appear on the Taskbar, below.

As with Windows 10, you can open any pinned application by typing WINKEY + some number, where some number represents its position in the Taskbar. For example, to launch the third pinned application, type WINKEY + 3. Note that built-in Taskbar items, like Start, Search, Task view, Widgets, and Chat do not count, but each has its own keyboard shortcut as noted elsewhere.

System tray

The Windows 11 Taskbar still provides a notification area—sometimes still called the system tray—as before, with various status notification icons, some of which can be hidden in an overflow area accessed by the chevron icon at the far left of the system tray.

You can drag and drop these icons to rearrange them if you’d like.

Three of the stock items in the system tray—Network, Volume, and Power—are always displayed and work differently than before. In Windows 10, each of these items would display its own user interface in a flyout when selected. But now each displays the new Quick settings interface when selected.

You can also display Quick settings by typing WINKEY + A. This was the keyboard shortcut for the Action Center in Windows 10.

As its name suggests, Quick settings is a quicker and more convenient way to access key system settings like Network, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and volume.

Oddly, these three stock items—Network, Volume, and Power—behave as before when you right-click them: each will display a simple context menu with options related to that item.

Date and time

To the right of the system tray, you will find a time and date display. If you select this display, the Notifications and Calendar panes will appear

You can also display Notifications and Calendar by typing WINKEY + N.

Notifications

The Notifications pane works much like the top area of Windows 10’s Action Center: it collects app and system notifications you have not seen or handled. You can remove individual notifications or, with the Clear all button, remove all remaining notifications. You can also use the Settings (“…”) link associated with an app or individual notification to access various options.

The Notifications pane also provides a Do not disturb button that toggles Windows 11’s Do not disturb feature.

Calendar

The Calendar pane displays the current date and a calendar view centered on the current month. It is not interactive per se, but you can navigate through the calendar in various ways:

Scroll up or down. Using the Up or Down arrow buttons—or the scroll wheel on your mouse or a two-finger gesture on your touchpad—you can scroll back and forward through time.

Jump to a new month. To jump to a new month in the current year, select the Month button. A semantic zoom view will appear, listing the other months. (You can scroll back and forward in time, as noted above, to navigate to months in other years.

Jump to a new year. To jump to a different year more quickly, select the Month button and then select the year button that appears in its place. A semantic zoom view will appear, listing the other nearby years. (You can scroll back and forward in time, as noted above, to navigate to further off years.)

Where did it go?

Windows 10 supported a much more functional Calendar pane that likewise appeared when you selected the date/time display in the Taskbar. That Calendar pane integrated with your online calendars and could show an agenda view that listed upcoming events from your calendars. And you could even create new events from the interface.

Unfortunately, none of those features are available in Windows 11.

Show desktop

It’s somewhat well hidden, but the Show desktop button, located at the far right of the Taskbar and to the right of the date/time display, can be used to toggle the display state of all of your open apps and other windows. When you select this button, all open apps and windows will immediately minimize, displaying the Desktop.

Select it again and all of those same apps and windows will be restored to their previous open state, location, and size.

You can also toggle Show desktop by typing WINKEY + D.

Understand Taskbar behaviors

The Windows 11 Taskbar was completely rewritten and isn’t based on the versions from Windows 10 or previous Windows versions. This is why the new Taskbar is simpler than before. It also helps to explain—but not excuse—why there are so many missing features. As bad, different parts of the Taskbar work inconsistently.

You can see the first impact of this redesign when you right-click an unused area of the Taskbar: in Windows 10, this resulted in a long context menu full of options, but Windows 11 displays a context menu with just two items, “Task Manager” and “Taskbar settings.”

If you select that one option, Settings opens and navigates to Personalization > Taskbar. Many of the customization options we discuss later in the chapter will occur via this interface. But first, let’s consider how this behavior impacts how you will interact with the Taskbar.

In previous Windows versions, the Taskbar and most of the items it contained were objects with which you could directly interact. This was in keeping with the desktop interface that Microsoft first delivered with Windows 95. It’s an object-based system where each object on-screen has actions you can perform. Selecting—or clicking—an object typically launches that object, while right-clicking it provides other options.

That’s not always true in Windows 11: if you right-click Widgets, Search, Task view, or Chat, for example, nothing happens. But app shortcuts on the Taskbar—like those for File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Store, plus any shortcuts you add—do support direct interaction via right-click: these shortcuts display a Jump List menu.

The system tray has likewise changed. In Windows 10, you could click the Network, Volume, or Power icons in the tray to display flyouts that were specific to each icon. But in Windows 11, it doesn’t matter which of those icons you select: the new Quick settings pane appears. But you can right-click each of these items in Windows 11 to display an item-specific context menu, as before. But these menus are typically simplified and have fewer options than before.

There’s nothing you can do about these changes. If you wish to customize the Taskbar, you pretty much need to open Taskbar settings and hope what you want is there. And you’ll just have to live with the fact that different items on the Taskbar behave differently when you click or right-click them.

“Pretty much” may sound like a cop-out, but the inconsistent design of the Taskbar means that you can, in fact, directly customize some aspects of this interface directly. For example, you can rearrange the app shortcuts on the Taskbar with drag-and-drop, and you can remove them via a right-click context menu choice. Likewise, some system tray icons can be similarly moved (but not removed).

Customize the Taskbar

Most (but not all) Taskbar customization occurs via Taskbar settings. You can reach this interface by right-clicking the Taskbar and choosing “Taskbar settings.”

You can also display Taskbar settings by opening Settings and navigating to Personalization > Taskbar.

Determine which items appear on the Taskbar

By default, Windows 11 displays a Start button, four Taskbar items—Widgets, Search, Task view, and Chat—three Microsoft app shortcuts—File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Store—and, optionally, two PC maker app shortcuts on the Taskbar. You can remove all of the items except for the Start button, change the position of any app shortcut, and add your own app shortcuts.

Remove unnecessary Taskbar items

None of the Taskbar items—again, Widgets, Search, Task view, and Chat—are strictly necessary because each of the underlying experiences can be launched with a keyboard shortcut (or, in the case of Search, via a Search bar in Start). And you may not ever even use some of these features. Either way, removing some (or all) of the Taskbar items will open up a lot of onscreen real estate for your own app shortcuts. So we recommend removing as many of these as possible. (We remove them all.)

What are those keyboard shortcuts, you ask? Here you go.

Widgets. Type WINKEY + W.
Search. Type WINKEY + S.
Task view. Type WINKEY + TAB.
Chat. Type WINKEY + C.

To remove some or all of the Taskbar items, open Taskbar settings. The first area at the top, called Taskbar items, provides toggles for each of the items. Just set each you don’t need to Off.

Manage app shortcuts

App shortcuts are not managed with the Settings app. Instead, you can add shortcuts from Start and elsewhere and move or remove shortcuts directly from the Taskbar.

Add an app shortcut. To add an app shortcut to the Taskbar, open Start (or Start search), find the app shortcut you wish to add to the Taskbar, right-click it, and choose “Pin to taskbar” from the context menu that appears.

There are other, more complicated ways to find apps to pin as shortcuts to the Taskbar, including using File Explorer, but the method noted above will give you the best results.

Move an app shortcut. To move an app shortcut, simply select it and hold, drag it left or right to a new location, and then drop it where you want it.

Remove an app shortcut. To remove an app shortcut from the Taskbar, right-click it and choose “Unpin from taskbar” from the context menu that appears.

Manage system tray icons

Windows 11 lets you configure which icons appear in the system tray using Taskbar settings. Unfortunately, there are two different areas to examine for some reason.

System tray icons. In this section, you will see toggles for three system tray icons that are typically only useful on tablet and 2-in-1 PCs with smartpens and multitouch interfaces: Pen menu, Touch keyboard, and Virtual touchpad. Unless you use these features regularly, you can safely toggle each to “Off” to hide them.

Other system tray icons. This area works differently: these are all icons that will display when necessary, but you can toggle any of them to “Off” to hide them in the system tray’s overflow area, which is accessed by selecting “Show hidden icons” (the caret icon) at the far left of the system tray. If an icon is set to “On,” it will appear on the Taskbar. Otherwise, it will appear in the overflow area flyout.

Manage Taskbar behaviors

The Windows 11 Taskbar may not offer the vast wealth of customization capabilities of its predecessor, but it does offer several useful settings you can configure in Taskbar behaviors.

Configure the Taskbar alignment

By default, Taskbar alignment is set to “Center,” but you can change it to “Left” if you want it to appear similarly to Windows 10 and previous Windows versions.

Automatically hide the Taskbar

By default, the Taskbar remains fixed to the bottom of the screen, but you can use this option to hide the Taskbar when you’re not interacting with it. To access a hidden Taskbar, just mouse down to the bottom edge of the screen: it will slide up.

Show badges on Taskbar app shortcuts

Some Windows apps, like Mail, can display a badge, which appears as an overlay on its Taskbar shortcut and indicates that something in the app requires your attention (there are unread emails, for example). This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it if desired.

Flash Taskbar app shortcut icons when there’s a notification

Some Windows apps flash their Taskbar shortcut icon when something happens, like a notification (there is a new email, for example). This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it if desired.

Configure the Taskbar for multiple displays

Those who use two or more external displays with their PCs—and have them configured to “extend” the internal display—have two other Taskbar options to consider in Taskbar behaviors.

You configure multiple displays in Display settings: Navigate to Settings (WINKEY + I) > System > Display and ensure that the presentation mode is set to “Extend these displays” and not “Duplicate these displays” or one of the other options.

They are:

Show my taskbar on all displays. Enabled by default, you can uncheck this option to show the Taskbar on only the main (or internal) display.

When using multiple displays, show my taskbar apps on. This is set to “All taskbars” by default, but you can change it to “Main taskbar and taskbar where window is open” or “Taskbar where window is open” if you prefer.

Configure the Search button

By default, Windows 11 will display a pop-up of recent searches when you mouse-over the Search button so you can access them more quickly. But you can disable that behavior if you’d like.

Configure window sharing from the Taskbar

Microsoft Teams is often used to share the screen with other people during a meeting. But with the “Share any windows from my taskbar” option enabled—as it is by default—you can share just a single app window instead. You do so by mousing over the app’s Taskbar shortcut during a Teams meeting: a Share button appears in its thumbnail pop-up.

Configure Show desktop

Show desktop is enabled in Windows 11 by default. But if you’d rather not use this feature, you can disable it by setting “Select the far corner of the taskbar to show the desktop” to “Off.”