Start (24H2)

You still open Start in Windows 11 by clicking the Start button in the Taskbar. But Start is significantly different from the version since in earlier Windows versions. As with the Taskbar, Start has been simplified, it’s now centered onscreen by default, and for the first time, it is a floating window, and not a traditional 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 in Windows 11. Others are no longer available.

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 a new era.

Pinned

Microsoft–and, for most people, your PC maker–populate the Pinned area with a collection of shortcuts, some useful and some promotional.

This area can scroll in place if the number of shortcuts it contains is too large to display them all at once in the available space. You can scroll between its various pages by using the little “Next Page” and “Previous Page” buttons that appear on the right, or by using your touchpad, mouse, or keyboard.

All apps

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

Recommended

By default, the Recommended area displays three different types of items: Recently installed apps; recently accessed documents, images, and other files; and, occasionally, a single “suggested” app that will download and install from the Microsoft Store if clicked.

Yes, that’s basically an ad, though Microsoft calls it a “suggestion.” We explain how to remove this atrocity in the End the nagging section in the Windows 11 Personalization First Steps chapter.

More recommended

To access a longer list of recent apps and files, click the “More” button next to Recommended. As with All apps, More Recommended takes over the Start window and provides a much longer list of recently installed apps and recently accessed documents, images, and other files. Fortunately, there are no ads in this view.

Search

A browser-like Search box appears at the top of Start.

If you start typing–or, select the box and then start typing–Start switches to the Search experience.

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 by default.

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, the so-called Account manager window appears. This is a small pop-up window that displays information about your sign-in account and a list of which free or paid Microsoft services associated with that account.

What you see here will depend on whether you subscribe to any Microsoft consumer services. All users will see “Microsoft 365” and “Cloud Storage” links. But those who pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, Copilot Pro, or PC Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will see links for those as well.

The links are actionable. When you click one, an appropriate website or Settings app page appears.

You can also click the “More options” button in the upper-right to access account-related options like Sign out and, if needed, Switch user. (That latter option will only appear if your PC has two or more configured sign-in accounts.)

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 Lock, Sleep, Shut down, and Restart when clicked.

Customize Start

Start offers a few customization options. Some are available directly in Start while others 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 physical size, aspect ratio, and resolution, and the Scale setting you or Windows configured.

We discuss your display’s Scale setting in the Customize the Display chapter.

You don’t have to accept the default layout. Instead, you can optionally choose a layout that displays more pins (and thus fewer recommendations) or more recommendations (and thus fewer pins) 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.

“More recommendations” works similarly, of course.

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 (“pin”) 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 that you can then fill with 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 too.

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.

No, we’re not kidding.

Customize All apps

The All apps view works as it did in Windows 10 in that it provides an alphabetical list of all the apps installed on your PC. It even uses the same non-obvious but useful 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 installed apps and most recently accessed documents and other files, commingled together (and, as noted previously, sometimes with an advertisement–sorry, a “suggestion”–for an app you may wish to install from the Microsoft Store). But you can configure Recommended to 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 recommended files in Start, recent files in File Explore, and items in Jump Lists. This convoluted option is enabled by default. It says “recommended” there because those who sign-in to Windows with an Entra ID work or school account can see documents and other files related to projects managed by their organization too. But for most people, this just means “your most recently accessed documents and other files.”

If 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 locations of the items in Recommended. Instead, this view acts as a Most Recently Used (MRU) list, with your most recent apps displaying before your most recent documents and files. But 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 icons) to the left side of the display

By default, Windows 11 centers Start and the Taskbar items and app shortcuts onscreen. But as we noted in the Taskbar chapter, you can optionally left-align these items so that the system resembles the Windows 10 look and feel.

To do so, open Settings (WINKEY + I), navigate to Personalize > Taskbar, expand “Taskbar behaviors,” and change the Taskbar alignment option from “Center” to “Left.” Note that the Widgets icon appears to the right of Task view when you configure this layout.

Display system folders in Start

Unlike 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, 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.