Windows 10 for Beginners

Windows 10 for Beginners

Table of Contents
Section 1 – Introduction to Windows 10 .............................................................................................. 5
Introduction to Windows 10 ............................................................................................................... 5

Downloading and Installing Windows 10 ........................................................................................ 7

Section 2 – Getting Started with Windows 10 .................................................................................... 11

Getting Started with Windows 10 .................................................................................................... 11

Opening and Running Apps ............................................................................................................... 16

User Accounts Basics .......................................................................................................................... 21

Exercise 01 ........................................................................................................................................... 25

Help and Support ................................................................................................................................ 26

Windows Update ................................................................................................................................. 29

Section 3 – Working in Desktop Mode ................................................................................................ 32

Working in Desktop Mode ................................................................................................................. 32

Managing and Using the Taskbar ..................................................................................................... 36

The Search box and Cortana ............................................................................................................. 40

Exercise 02 ........................................................................................................................................... 43

Notifications and Action Center ....................................................................................................... 44

Using Windows and Dialogs .............................................................................................................. 46

The Start Menu .................................................................................................................................... 50

Section 4 – Using Settings and Control Panel..................................................................................... 53

Using Settings and Control Panel ..................................................................................................... 53

Basic Settings ....................................................................................................................................... 55

Display Settings ................................................................................................................................... 59

Power Options ..................................................................................................................................... 61

Ease of Access ........................................................................................................................................ 64

Section 05 – Personalizing your Windows 10 ................................................................................... 68

Personalizing your Windows 10 ...................................................................................................... 68

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Exercise 03 ........................................................................................................................................... 72

Managing Tiles and Apps ................................................................................................................... 73

Section 6 – Introduction to File Explorer ........................................................................................... 77

Introduction to File Explorer ............................................................................................................ 77

More about File Explorer ................................................................................................................... 82

Searching Files and Folders .............................................................................................................. 87

OneDrive ............................................................................................................................................... 90

Recycle Bin ........................................................................................................................................... 94

Exercise 04 ........................................................................................................................................... 96

Section 7 – Family Accounts .................................................................................................................. 97

Family Accounts .................................................................................................................................. 97

Sign-in Options .................................................................................................................................... 99

Exercise 05 ......................................................................................................................................... 101

Section 8 – Desktop Program Examples ........................................................................................... 102

Desktop Program Examples ............................................................................................................ 102

Exercise 06 ......................................................................................................................................... 107

Section 9 – Store Apps .......................................................................................................................... 108

Store Apps........................................................................................................................................... 108

The Microsoft Store .......................................................................................................................... 111

Apps and Modes................................................................................................................................. 115

Section 10 – Connecting to the Internet ............................................................................................ 117

Connecting to the Internet .............................................................................................................. 117

Microsoft Edge ................................................................................................................................... 121

Internet Explorer .............................................................................................................................. 125

Exercise 07 ......................................................................................................................................... 128

Section 11 – Setting Up Sounds and Playing Audio ......................................................................... 129

Setting Up Sounds and Playing Audio ........................................................................................... 129

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 12 - Pictures ............................................................................................................................. 134

Pictures ............................................................................................................................................... 134

Movies and TV .................................................................................................................................... 138

Exercise 08 ......................................................................................................................................... 141

Section 13 – Sharing Files, Folders, and Printers............................................................................ 142

Sharing Files ....................................................................................................................................... 142

Section 14 – Backing Up and Restoring Data ................................................................................... 145

Backing Up and Restoring Data ...................................................................................................... 145

System and Administration............................................................................................................. 150

Section 15 – Additional Useful Apps .................................................................................................. 154

Snipping Tools and Sticky Notes .................................................................................................... 154

Section 16 – Closing .............................................................................................................................. 158

Additional Topics and Closing ........................................................................................................ 158

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 1 – Introduction to Windows 10

Video: Introduction to Windows 10

Deborah: Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome to this course on Microsoft Windows 10.
My name is Deb, and I'm going to be your instructor for this course. And this is the first
introductory section. I'm going to go through a little bit about myself, we're going to review who
this course is for. I'm going to talk you through the structure of this course. And then finally, I'm
going to cover some of the assumptions I'm going to make. So first, just a little bit about me.
So I'm a Microsoft IT trainer. And I specialize in the design, delivery and facilitation of
Microsoft courses, both online and in the classroom. And I've been using Windows in its various
different versions for about 25 years now. So I've really been able to see how Windows has
evolved since around the mid-90s, up until the present day. Now this course is designed for
Windows 10 beginners, so if you've never used windows 10 before, then this course is going to
be perfect for you.
Also, if you're used to using a much earlier version of Windows, and when I say earlier version,
I'm talking about something like XP or maybe even Vista, then again, this course is going to be
perfect for you because Windows 10 is so vastly different from those two versions of Windows.
However, if you are coming to this course from a more modern versions, so I would say
Windows 7, Windows 8 or 8.1, then you're still going to get value from this course, because
Windows 10 has a lot of differences. But there might also be some things which are very similar
to the version that you're used to using.
So what I would say to you is if you're going through this course, and you get to a module, and
you think to yourself, this is very similar to the version that I currently use, then by all means
skip over that module and move on to the next one. And when it comes to the structure of this
course, I'm going to try and go through the course logically, I'm going to cover all of the sections
in sequence. And this course is made up of a number of different topic related sections. And
within each section, you'll find a number of modules. Within each module, there will be a
demonstration video, and those videos will be up to 15 minutes long.
You'll also find scattered throughout this course usually around one per section, you will have an
exercise to complete. So the purpose of these exercises is really just to give you a chance to
practice some of the skills that you've learned in that particular section. And then at the end of
the course, there will be a quiz, which will just test your knowledge of the overall course. So it
gives you a really good chance to see how far you've come from the beginning of the course to
the end.
Now the final thing I want to mention in this module is the assumptions that I'm going to make.
So I'm going to assume that you have an installed copy of Windows 10. And you'll see in the
following modules that there are a few different versions of Windows 10 as well. I'm also going
to assume that you're going through this course on a desktop PC, or maybe a laptop. And what I

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Windows 10 for Beginners

mean by that is that you're not practicing Windows 10 on a mobile phone device or a tablet. Now
tablet is very interesting. You'll see when we get into Windows 10, there is an option to move
into Tablet mode, which is specifically related to tablet users.
Now I'm not going to focus on that in this particular course, everything I show you is going to be
more related to Desktop mode for desktop, PC and laptop users. However, I would say that if
you do predominantly use a tablet, you're still going to get value from this course because a lot of
the features I demonstrate in Desktop mode are not that dissimilar to the Tablet mode, but just
bear that in mind as we go through.
Now with all that said, if you don't have Windows 10 already installed, we're actually going to
cover that in the next module. So I'm going to head over there now. So I will see you there.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Downloading and Installing Windows 10

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this section,
we're going to be talking about how you can acquire Windows 10 if you don't already have it.
Now just for clarity, I am using a laptop device. It's running Windows 10, and you can see here I
have a very nice desktop picture background of a beach. And this is just one of the standard
backgrounds that's available from within Windows. And I'm going to be showing you how you
can personalize all elements of Windows including how you can change up your desktop
background picture in later modules. But this module is about acquiring Windows 10.
And I would say that if you already have Windows 10, on your PC or on your laptop, this is one
of the sections that you can skip. However, if you don't already have it, then stick with me,
because we're going to go through a number of things in this module, which are going to be
really important for you to know.
So the first thing we're going to talk about is how to identify which version you are on. I’m then
going to show you some of these System Requirements for running Windows 10. I'm going to
show you how you can acquire or download Windows 10 if you don't already have it. We're
going to talk a little bit about the difference between Microsoft Accounts and Local Accounts.
And then I'm going to speak to you about how you can Upgrade or Install Windows 10.
Now, I will add that in this demonstration, I'm not actually going to install Windows 10 because
I already have it. But I'm going to show you where to go, how you do it, and give you a few tips
along the way. So let's start out this module with how you can identify which version of
Windows you're using. And for this, you're going to need to look at your System Information.
Now in order to pull that up, there is a quick shortcut way of doing that, you need to hold down
the Windows key. So if you've never used the Windows key before, if you look down at your
keyboard, and find where your spacebar is, you'll find that it's either one key or two keys to the
left of your spacebar. And it looks like a little tiny window. That is your Windows key. So what
you need to do is hold down the Windows key and press the Pause key on your keyboard. And
you'll find that located somewhere over on that top row towards the right-hand side.
Now some keyboards and this does include mine, you may have to add in the Function key in
order to get Pause to activate. So for me, I need to press the Windows key, Function and Pause to
quickly get to my system information. And you can see here, I can now see which version of
Windows 10 I'm using. And it's telling me at the top there, Windows edition, Windows 10
Home.
So this moves me on quite nicely to talk about the different editions of Windows that you can
download. So I'm just on the Windows homepage of the Microsoft website. And you can see
here it's saying to me; “Compare Windows 10 Home versus Pro”. So these are the two main
versions that you're going to be dealing with; Home or Pro. And I just want to point out at this
stage, Microsoft do tend to like to change up their web pages. So what you see here or what I'm

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Windows 10 for Beginners

seeing on this page, by the time you work your way through this course this page may have
changed very slightly.
But as always, if you jump onto Google and type in Windows Home or Windows Pro and
Microsoft, it's going to take you to the relevant page. Now if you want to do a comparison
between Windows 10 Home versus Pro to see which one's going to best suit your needs, if we
scroll down this page, you'll see you get the direct comparison. So you can see all of the features
that are included in Windows 10 Home, and all of the features that are included in Windows 10
Pro. And as you would expect, you do get slightly more features in Windows 10 Pro.
Now I will say and there are a few more features down here, there's only really a couple more
extra features that you get with Windows 10 Pro. So the fact that I'm using Windows 10 Home
for the purposes of this course, is going to be absolutely fine. Everything I need to show you is
covered in Windows 10 Home. But if you are considering which one you want to download, I
would come on to this page, have a read through, and then make the decision as to which one is
going to best suit your needs.
And one thing I will say is that Windows 10 Home is probably suitable for the majority of
people. I would only download Pro if I needed to do something like maybe join a business
domain. So if I needed to connect to a domain at work, then I would need to download Windows
10 Pro. Now if you're not really a 100% sure, it's definitely worth checking with your IT team at
work and asking for their advice as well.
Now, there's also a couple of other editions of Windows, Enterprise and Education. The
Enterprise version is available by volume licensing. And most very large organizations will have
some kind of enterprise license. I will say that you can't just walk into a shop and buy the
Enterprise version. And the same is also true for the Education version, which is mainly for
teachers and schools. Now, both of these versions are outside of the scope of this course, and we
won't be covering them. But just be aware that there are those two additional versions as well.
Now another thing that you should definitely check prior to downloading Windows 10 is your
System Requirements. And what we mean by that is what is the minimum required in order to be
able to run Windows 10 on your PC, laptop or tablet successfully. And again, if you jump on or
Google Windows 10 system requirements, it will take you through to the Microsoft support site.
And you can see there on this page, what your System Requirements are for running Windows
10 successfully.
Now when it comes to acquiring or downloading a copy of Windows 10, you can jump on to the
Microsoft Store. Now I'm currently in the US Microsoft Store, but make sure that you go into the
correct one for your location. And you can see here I have an option to purchase the various
different copies of Windows 10. And if we jump into the Windows 10 Home, I'm going to click
shop now. And you can see that you have two ways of obtaining your copy of Windows 10. You
can choose to download it and I would say these days that is the most popular, it's instant. Or you
can choose to get it on a USB or flash drive.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now as I said, most people do get it via the download. But it's worth bearing in mind that you're
going to need at least three gig of spare space on your PC to enable you to download a copy of
Windows 10. Also, if you don't have a particularly great internet connection, it might be better
for you to get the USB version. Because sometimes if your internet connection isn't particularly
great, and you choose to download a very large file, which this is, that can take a very, very long
time tying up all of your system resources, and possibly preventing you from doing other things.
So bear that in mind when you're choosing which option you want.
Now the Microsoft Store isn't the only place that you can go to purchase a copy of Windows 10.
There are many, many other websites out there which are selling copies of Windows 10. I would
advise however, that you do try and buy from a reputable source. And also we still have the,
what is sometimes termed as the old fashioned way, you can walk into your local computer store.
So if you're in the UK, that might be something along the lines of PC World. And you can pick
up a physical copy of Windows 10 to install onto your PC or laptop. So a few different options
for you. By far, the most convenient is this Download option from this page.
Now in the following modules, we are going to set up an account on our PC in Windows 10. And
one thing you're going to need to decide is whether you want to use a Microsoft Account or a
Local Account. And by default, you will be asked to use a Microsoft Account. And it's a very
straightforward process to set this up on microsoft.com. And we are going to go through that in
one of the later modules. But I just want to briefly introduce the concept to you in this particular
module.
Now there are pros and cons to each. And I've actually just jumped on to the Microsoft support
forum. So this is a community forum where people post questions and then other people provide
answers. And you can see here someone has asked the question regarding Microsoft Accounts
versus Local Accounts on Windows 10. And they actually get a really good comprehensive
answer just here, which is definitely worth a read through. But to give you a basic overview of
the difference between the two, a Microsoft Account gives you essentially a single sign on,
which is similar to a Google account or something like Facebook.
If you log in or operate under a Microsoft Account, it gives you access to things like OneDrive,
you can also download apps. So using a Microsoft Account makes things really convenient. But
there is a little bit of a cost to that. And the majority of the cons with regards to Microsoft
Accounts are related to security. Now, I'm not going to delve into this too much at the moment.
But I will say that if you're not really sure if you understand the difference between the two, it's
definitely worth jumping onto Google, googling Microsoft Account versus Local Account, and
doing a little bit of further reading.
As I said, I am going to go into this a little bit more when we get to that module, but it's good to
give yourself some background knowledge. And this particular answer is pretty detailed, which
is why I like to show this particular answer, definitely worth a read. Now, a Local Account is one
that's just set up locally on your PC. And it's worth noting that if you do choose to set up a Local
Account, you can switch it to a Microsoft Account later. And with a Local Account, each user of
the PC has a separate account, it's standalone, so it's good for security.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So it might be that you have three members in your family, and everybody uses the same PC,
you may want to have a different account for each member of the family. So when they go to the
PC, they click on their name, they log in, and it's got all of their settings, all of their shortcuts,
everything that they need, which is completely different to the other accounts that are set up
locally on that machine. So that's definitely one thing to think about Local Account versus
Microsoft Accounts.
So I'm now back at the Windows Store, which was the page that we were on previously. So
when it comes to upgrading or installing Windows 10, we've seen how simple that is. We just
scroll down, we select the version that we want to download, and then we can choose how we
want to download that either by electronic download or USB. If I just click back to go back to
this homepage, you can see at the top here, it says; “Ready to upgrade to Windows 10”?
Now, I would definitely click on Check compatibility if you're upgrading from an older version
of Windows. And again, this is where you'll have all of those System Requirements for installing
Windows 10. So make sure that your PC or the device that you're using meets all of those
requirements before you go in and purchase your copy of Windows 10. Now if you have any
trouble when it comes to installing Windows 10, I would always advise you just refer to
microsoft.com.
They have some really great support pages and you can normally through reading, research,
asking questions, seeing other people's questions, you can normally fix your own problem. So
having downloaded Windows 10, you should be ready to start using it. So that's exactly what
we're going to do in the next module where I'm going to walk you through how to get started
using Windows 10. So I will see you over there.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 2 – Getting Started with Windows 10

Video: Getting Started with Windows 10

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to my course on Windows 10. In this module, I'm
going to show you how you can get started in Windows 10.
So we're going to start out by taking a look at Starting Windows 10. And also some of the lock
options that you have. We're going to go through the Desktop, we're then going to take a look at
the Start Menu. And I'm going to show you some options you have when it comes to working in
Tablet Mode. I'm also going to show the options you have for shutting down Windows 10. So if
you're already, let's get started.
Now, when it comes to starting Windows 10, or logging out of Windows 10, one option I want to
start with is the Lock Screen. Now the Lock Screen is particularly useful if you are at work and
you've got lots and lots of different applications open. And maybe you just need to pop away
from your desk, maybe you need to go to a meeting or you're going to lunch or on a break, and
you don't really want to close down everything that you've got opened on your screen. But at the
same time, you don't want just anybody to be able to walk up to your PC, wiggle the mouse and
access all of your applications.
So a good option here is to lock your screen. It's going to keep everything running and open in
the background, but it's going to pop up a password so that somebody can't just jump onto your
PC and look at everything that you have open. So the quickest way to lock your PC is to press
Ctrl, Alt, Del. Now what you see I get is I just get my desktop background picture. And this is a
different one that I have on my actual desktop. And it just shows some basic information that I
have on my Lock Screen.
And as with always in Microsoft, what you see on here is customizable. So I have the Time and
the current Date. I can also see in the very bottom left-hand corner, it's telling me that I have
three email notifications. And then on the right-hand side, I can see that I am connected to Wi-Fi.
And I can also see the percentage of battery power that I have left in my laptop. And you can
also see that I actually have it plugged in and charging at the moment. So once you lock your
screen, when you come back to it, all you need to do is to click on your screen anywhere, and it's
going to take you to your Lock Screen and it's going to ask you to log in.
Now again, on the bottom left-hand side, you can see that I have two accounts set up on this
laptop. So I have my account that's currently highlighted. And there's also somebody else who
has access to my laptop with a Local Account. So make sure that you select your account, and
then you're going to be asked for your pin or your password. Now I prefer to have a pin. But that
really is just personal preference. And again, in some of the later sections, I'm going to show you
how you can specify if you want to log in with a password, or if you want to use some kind of
pin.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

You can see above that I have a picture of myself. And then underneath that I have a link, if I
forget my pin, I can get a reminder. And I've got a direct link to my sign-in options just there.
And then in the bottom left-hand corner again, we have some symbols. So it's telling me that my
keyboard is English United States, I can see my Wi-Fi connection, I can see I have Ease of
Access turned on. And then I have my power button if I want to do something like shut down
completely. Now at this stage, I'm just going to log back in by typing in my pin. So now I'm back
on my desktop. So whilst we're here, let's just do a very quick tour around the Windows 10
desktop.
Now on the main part of the screen, in the top left-hand corner, you can see I've got a couple of
icons there. I have a Recycle Bin, and I also have Microsoft Edge. Now, these are Desktop Icons.
And some people have a lot of Desktop Icons, other people not so many. Now I'm in that latter
group, I tend not to have too many icons on my desktop, I prefer to have my icons pinned across
the bottom in my Taskbar. But again, this is very much personal preference. And what these
Desktop Icons are, are essentially shortcuts to the applications.
So if I want to quickly access my Recycle Bin, I can just click on the shortcut from here. And it's
going to jump me into my Recycle Bin. The same thing with Edge, if I wanted to open up the
Edge internet browser, I can double click and it's going to take me there straightaway. So
Desktop Icons will appear on your desktop. And I'm going to show you how to create those a bit
later on.
Now running across the bottom now we have the Windows key, which is our Start Menu. Now
we're going to cover the Start Menu in a lot of detail in some of the following modules. So I'm
going to leave that for now. But it is a very important button. We then have the Search bar.
Again, we're going to cover that in later modules. I then have a number of icons on my Taskbar.
And these tend to be the applications that I use all of the time. So you can see I have on there a
lot of the Microsoft applications, so Excel, Word, PowerPoint, so on and so forth. I have a couple
of internet browsers, I have the Camtasia software that I use to record these videos, I have a link
to File Explorer, so I can quickly access my documents, and also very quick link to my Settings
as well.
Now again, what you see down here is very much personal preference. And I'm going to show
you how you can essentially add things or remove things from this Taskbar again in some of the
following modules. Then finally, right over on the right-hand side, we have our Notification area.
And in older versions of Windows, this was referred to as the System Tray. And again, the icons
that you see down here are customizable. Now I like to have icons that display information that's
useful to me. So I like to see if I have my Volume muted. I like to see what my Battery life is, I
like to see my Wi-Fi connection. And then of course, I have the Time and the Date there as well.
And then finally, right on the very end, we have this kind of it looks like a little bit like a speech
bubble. This is the Action Center. And if I click on this, this gives me an overview. So I can see
there at the top very easily the last two emails that I've received. And then I have a number of
different tiles that I can essentially click on or click off to toggle on and off. So you can see at the

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Windows 10 for Beginners

moment, the only two of those I have turned on are Wi-Fi because I am using a Wi-Fi
connection, and I also have my Location running as well.
But for example, if I wanted to turn on Bluetooth, I could just come over here, click on the
Bluetooth tile, and that's going to very quickly turn that on for me. Now this little Action Center
and all of these tiles again can be customized to what's going to be most useful to you. And as
you might have guessed, we are going to cover this in a later module. Finally at the bottom there,
I can very simply adjust the brightness of my screen by dragging this slider up or down. So lots
of options in there.
Now before we leave this module, I want to briefly jump back to this Start Menu. And there's
quite a lot to cover in the Start Menu. So I really want to just introduce you to the Start Menu in
this module. Now the Start Menu, you'll find under this little Windows icon all the way over on
the left-hand side. So you can either click on the Windows icon to pull up the Start Menu. Or
alternatively, if you press that Windows key on your keyboard, that's going to allow you to
access it as well.
Now this Start Menu has been a bit controversial over the years. So for anybody out there who
used Windows 7, if you can remember back to that, Windows 7 was very much just the menu
part of this screen. Then when we moved on to Windows 8 and 8.1, Microsoft introduced these
tiles that you can see just here. And a lot of people really didn't like just having the tiles, they
missed that menu. So kind of what we have in Windows 10 is a compromise, a combination of
both. So we still have our old Windows 7 style Menu System, but we also have tiles there as well
if we want to use them.
Now again, we're not going to delve into this too much in this module. But just want to make you
aware of some of the things that you have on here. So if we start with just this menu running
down the left-hand side, you can see that we have access to our Power options if we want to Shut
down or Restart, we have a quick way of accessing our Settings, I can jump directly to my
Pictures folder, and also my Documents folder. So if I click on Documents, this essentially is
going to open up File Explorer and jump me straight to my Documents folder. And then I have
access to essentially my Profile, my Account on this PC.
Now moving across to this middle section, this is where you will see all of the apps and
applications and facilities that you have on your PC. And these are all listed in alphabetical
order. And any applications that you've added recently to your system will be listed at the top. So
you can see here that recently, I downloaded or installed Microsoft Edge and I also downloaded
Microsoft Teams as well. Now if I want to scroll through this list, you'll see that I have a little
scroll bar at the side here. So I can then scroll through, and I can look at all of my applications.
And as you might expect, if I want to open one of these applications, I can just select it from the
menu in order to open that application.
Now, all of these letter dividers, so you can see here where it says A, where I'm currently
hovered. If I click on A, it's going to take me into this little alphabet sized panel. So if I want to
jump to something in particular, so maybe I'm looking for something related to Microsoft, I click

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Windows 10 for Beginners

on M, and it's going to jump me straight down to that part of the Menu System. So don't forget
that you have that there as well.
And then on the right, we have our tiles. So these are very much those Windows 8, Windows 8.1
style tiles. Some people love these, some people hate them, I am a little bit like I don't tend to use
them so much. But I do know a lot of people who do really like using them. Now I don't have
mine particular customized or set up in any particularly nice logical sequence. But what you can
do is you can add any of your applications or apps as tiles, you can organize them into different
groups. So you can see at the top here, I have Life at a Glance, which is one of the groups that
Windows 10 automatically creates for you. You can rename these groups, you can add more, and
you can add whatever tiles you want to into those groups.
And again, it's just a quick way of being able to access your applications and any apps that you
have. So if I wanted to open Excel, I can just click on this Excel tile. And that's going to go away
and open Excel for me. So very, very simple to use. Now, as I said, I'm not going to speak a lot
in this course about Tablet Mode. But I just want to show you if you are using a tablet where you
can go to switch on Tablet Mode essentially. So I'm going to go back to my Start Menu, I'm
going to press my Windows key. And I'm actually going to go to Settings, I'm going to click on
this little cog icon. I'm going to click on System. And you'll see here in this long list of options,
one of the options we have is Tablet Mode.
Now I like to keep the, “when I sign-in option to use the appropriate mode for my hardware”.
And that's because when I sign-in, Windows is going to automatically detect if I'm using a tablet,
or if I'm using a desktop. And it's going to switch the mode depending on which one it picks up.
And when you switch into Tablet Mode, what it essentially does is it optimizes all of the
windows features for a tablet device. So for example, it will give you more room in between
icons, because it's allowing for your finger as opposed to a mouse cursor.
Now you don't have to have the, “use appropriate mode setting”, you can set it to use Tablet
Mode permanently. So if you work permanently on a tablet, you can just switch into that mode
and have it start up in that mode every single time. There's a few other options in here for
customizing Tablet Mode, which you might want to look at if you do use a tablet device. Now
saying that, an even quicker way to switch into Tablet Mode, and this is particularly useful if
sometimes you work on a desktop and sometimes you work on a tablet. If we go back to that
Action Center in the bottom right-hand corner, you can see one of the titles that I have here is
Tablet Mode. So I can very quickly toggle it on or toggle it off depending on what device I'm
using at any given time.
Now finally, I just want to talk to you about shutting down Windows 10. Now, of course, if you
wanted to, you can just press the power button on your device. Although I would say that
sometimes that's quite a harsh way of shutting down your PC. I would always recommend if you
are just going to switch it off, make sure that you've fully saved everything and properly exited
all of your applications. Don't leave them all open and then just turn the power button off. That's
never good. It's what we would call a hard shutdown.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now your other Power options if you click on the Start Menu again. So I'm going to press my
windows key. You'll see at the bottom there it says Power. So if I click on power, I have Sleep,
Shutdown and Restart. So Sleep is a good one to use if maybe you're going to sleep at night,
maybe you've got a lot of stuff open, you can put your PC into Sleep mode, which won't close
down everything, but it's going to use very little power. So all you need to do to log back in in
the morning is touch your keyboard, type in your pin or your password, and you're up and
running again.
Now Shutdown is pretty much what it says on the thing; it's going to shut everything on your PC
down and turn your PC off. And then finally Restart is probably an option that you've used many
times before. There might be occasions where you need to restart your device such as if you've
installed maybe a new application which requires a restart in order for it to be able to work, then
you might want to use that option. And it basically does a shutdown and then automatically
restarts your PC and will land you back at the login page where you type in your password or
your pin.
So those are the options that you have. Now there is one more option called Hibernate. But
again, I'm going to discuss that more in later modules. But for now, that's a very quick overview
of how to get started, how to navigate your way around the Windows 10 desktop. That's it for
this module. I will see you in the next one.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Opening and Running Apps

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to our course on Windows 10. In this module, I'm
going to talk to you about Running Apps and Desktop Programs. So this is one of the most
frequent things that you will do when working in Windows 10.
Once you've logged in, you're going to want to start to open your apps and maybe run apps as
well. So we're going to go through the basics of that in this particular module. And one of the
things I really want to highlight in this module is the difference between Apps and Desktop
Programs. But we're going to start out by taking a further look at that Start Menu.
I'm going to show you how you can start Apps and Desktop Programs, I'm going to show you a
really nice little feature that will help you work in multiple different windows. So we're going to
look at Snapping Apps. And then finally, I'm going to show you how you can easily Close any
applications that you have open. So let's start out again by taking a look at some more details
related to that Start Menu.
Now, we looked at this in previous modules. And we know that to get to our Start Menu, we can
either click on that Windows logo in the bottom left-hand corner. Alternatively, we can press the
Windows key on our keyboard. Now when that Start Menu pops up, obviously, you've got your
menu items running down the left-hand side, and then you have those tiles in the middle. I'm
going to delve more into tiles and organizing them in later modules. But all I really want to show
you here is the fact that you can actually modify the size of this Start Menu.
So if you're finding this a little bit too big, a bit too cumbersome, then if you hover your mouse
over the right-hand side, you can see I get a little double headed arrow. Which means, I can
simply drag it in to make that a little bit thinner. I can do exactly the same at the top. So if I want
to make it shorter, I can just click and drag that down. So that allows me to see a lot more of
whatever I've got underneath that being an application or just my simple background like I do
here. Now I find that a little bit too small so I'm just going to drag mine up very slightly, and also
back out again.
Now as we've seen previously, if you want to start up an application, one way of doing it is to
scroll through your list of applications which are all organized alphabetically, and you can click
to open. So for example, I can click to open up Excel. Now another way that I can do this is I
could select my applications from this tiles area. Now I don't have a great deal of stuff in this
particular area at the moment. I am going to add to it as we go through the course. But I do have
a few things. So for example, if we keep it consistent, if I wanted to open up Excel, I can see that
I have my Excel icon underneath this Life at a Glance section. If I click it, it expands that little
folder, I can then click on the tile again just to launch Excel. So a couple of really simple ways
just to open your applications from that Start Menu.
Now one thing I want to point out in this menu in particular, is if we scroll through, you'll see
that most of the items in this list have an icon next to them to help you identify that particular
item. But if I scroll down, you'll see that some of them have this little folder icon. So if we look

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

at this one here, it says Microsoft Office Tools, I have a little folder icon. Now with these folder
icons, what you'll also see is that you'll have a little dropdown at the side. So if I click to expand
that, it's going to show me the items that are located under that particular folder.
Now the reason why I'm highlighting this to you is because sometimes that can be a little bit
confusing when you're searching for a particular application. If I give you an example, if I
wanted to open up the Notepad application on my PC, if I jumped down to N which is just
below, I don't have Notepad in there. Now I know that Notepad is installed. So, where might that
be lurking? Well, in this case, I happen to know that Notepad is a Windows Accessory.
So if I scroll down my list and get to my W area, you can see I have a folder here again,
Windows Accessories. If I expand that, it's going to show me all of those accessories and one of
them there is Notepad. So what I'm trying to say to you here is if you're looking for a particular
application and you can't find it, it might be that it's located in a folder. Now, you're not going to
know the name of the folder that it's located in a lot of the time and of course there is a much
easier way to find your applications than going through every single folder. But I'm going to get
onto that when we go through all of the options we have related to Search. But just be aware, it
might be lurking somewhere different to where you think.
So we're going to leave the Start Menu for the time being, and we're going to shift our focus
down to that Taskbar that we have running across the bottom. Now, as I mentioned before, this is
kind of my preferred way of opening up my applications. I like to have all of the applications
that I use most frequently pinned to this Taskbar. And there's a few reasons why I prefer this
method. One of them is that they're super easy to access.
So you can see down here, I have very easy access to File Explorer, if I just click it opens it up.
And pretty much all of the applications that I use, I have the Microsoft Office Suite, I have a
couple of web browsers. And on the end here, I have some applications that are related to the
recording of this video. So you might be wondering, how do you get your applications to be
pinned down on that Taskbar? Well again, it's pretty simple.
We're going to jump back into our Start Menu, so windows key. And all you need to do is find
the application or the Desktop Program that you want to pin. And I'm going to use one of the
tiles here actually, I'm going to pin the Microsoft Store. Right-click on the tile or on the menu
item, go down to More, and you can see that you have a Pin to Taskbar option. One thing you'll
also notice in here is you also have an Unpin from Start option. So if I wanted to remove the
Store from that Start screen, I could choose to unpin it. But for now, I'm going to select Pin to
Taskbar. So there we go.
If you now glanced down at that Taskbar, you'll see that I've added the Microsoft Store to the
Taskbar. Similarly, if I decide at any point that I don't need a particular application pinned to that
Taskbar, all I would need to do is right-click on it, and select Unpin from Taskbar. And it's gone.
So whilst this isn't an exercise, I think it would be really good practice for you to go into your
Start Menu, to find those applications and Desktop Programs that you use all the time, and just
practice pinning them down on to your Taskbar.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now, if you want at any point to rearrange the order of the icons that you have down there, it's
just a simple case of grabbing the icon and dragging it to its new location. So you can see there
I'm dragging File Explorer along, and I'm gonna put it there after my web browsers. Now if I
clicked over File Explorer, you'll see that some of my icons have a blue line underneath them. So
you can see Google Chrome, File Explorer, Excel, and then a couple of the icons towards the end
of my Taskbar. Now all that basically means is that that application is running. So it's open
somewhere on my PC.
You'll see if I open up the Microsoft Edge web browser, soon as I do that, it gets a blue line
underneath it. And if I close that web browser down, I no longer have that blue line there. Now
again, what color this line appears in is completely customizable. And we will get onto that when
we talk about Personalization.
Now another thing that's worth noting is when you do have a few different things open, if you
want to switch between your applications. So currently, I have File Explorer on top, if I wanted
to switch to my browser, all I would need to do would be to click on the browser icon in the
Taskbar, and it's going to pull that to the front. If I switch back to File Explorer, click again, and
it pulls that to the front. So a very easy way to switch between your different applications that
you have open.
Now one thing that's really important is understanding the difference between Apps and Desktop
Programs. You'll quite often hear them used interchangeably, but they are actually quite
different. So an example of a Desktop Program would be one of the Office applications. So
something like Excel, or Word or PowerPoint, or even a Windows Utility. So something like
Notepad like we were looking at earlier. Those would be Desktop Programs.
Whereas apps tend to be something that are a bit more self-contained. So for example, Netflix is
an app that I've downloaded. Solitaire is an app that's been downloaded. And the difference
between Apps and Desktop Programs is that when you open up an app, it’s very much
independent from everything else. So the app will have its own Menu System, it will have its
own way of working with that app. Whereas Desktop Programs tend to work in a similar way.
You'll have the standard Windows menu dropdowns, contextual menus, all of those types of
things. So let me just show you an example of an app.
I'm going to jump into this Solitaire collection app, and there we go. So we have the app open
and you can see what I mean. It has a menu in the top left-hand corner with its own style of
Menu System. Now one thing that you'll notice is a difference with Windows 10, particularly if
you've come from Windows 8, or 8.1, is that in those older versions, when you opened up an
app, it would open up in full screen mode, so you wouldn't see the Taskbar or anything else on
the screen aside from that app.
Now, that doesn't happen automatically in Windows 10. You can see even though I've got this
app open, I can still see my Taskbar running across the bottom. However, what you'll find in
most of the apps is there will be some way for you to switch that to full screen mode. And I can
see in this particular app in the top corner, I have Full Screen View, which just gets rid of that
Taskbar and allows me to work with more space in the particular application. I think these days

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Windows 10 for Beginners

most of us are used to the concept of apps, we all have mobile phones, we always download apps
onto our mobile phones, works in a very similar way here. I could jump into the Microsoft Store,
I can browse through their apps, and I can load apps onto my PC.
Now when we were looking at the Taskbar, I was showing you how you can switch between
apps simply by clicking on the relevant icon on the Taskbar to bring that particular application to
the front. Another little feature that you have is this little icon just here; Task View. And if I
click that, what that's going to do is it's going to show me everything that I have running on my
PC at the moment.
So you can see I have a couple of Excel documents open, I have a PowerPoint presentation open,
I have my recording software, because I'm recording this tutorial. And you can see that I can
scroll through and see other items that I had open earlier today, yesterday, and even further back
than that. And if I want to switch to them, I can just simply click to pull that into view. So this
Task View is a great way of really kind of getting an overview of everything that you have open.
Another thing that I like to do in here is I like to come in here to close apps. So if I've got about
20 different things open, sometimes a little bit tedious to go through switching to each
application and closing things down. If I go into Task View, you can see if I hover over this
Book1 Excel, I get that little cross in the top corner, I can just click it, and it closes it. So I can
just go through clicking the cross on each document that I no longer require. And that is actually
a lot more efficient than doing it the other way.
Now I want to show you something that is a facility that I use all the time, I find myself
constantly working in two different parts of the screen. So for example, I might be writing some
notes for a training course in Word, and I might also be doing some research on the internet
related to that training course trying to work out what I want to put in the course. So I like to
have my internet browser open in one half of the screen and my Word document open in the
other half of the screen. And Windows 10 gives us this really nice feature called Snapping,
which allows us to easily do that. So let me do just that.
I'm going to open up Word just by tapping on the icon. And we'll just do a blank documents. I'm
also going to open up my Microsoft Edge browser. Now if I want these in each half of the
screen, all I need to do is go up to the top of my Edge browser, click on the title bar, that gray bar
at the top and kind of pick up that window. And then I'm going to drag it all the way over to the
left-hand side until I see that little ghosting. When I let go, it's going to snap to those ghosted
boundaries. And cleverly, what it does is it then minimizes all of my other running applications.
And I can choose which one I want to display in the other half of the screen.
So in this case, I want to display the Word document. So I just select it, and I now have them
both organized perfectly in each half of the screen. Now, it's also worth noting that you can do
this with up to four documents. So I could have four documents in each corner if I wanted to.
Again what I would do if I maximize that, if I grab Internet Explorer, and this time, instead of
dragging it over to the left-hand side, I'm going to drag it more up towards the corner. And you
can see I get that a little ghost in just there let go and it puts it in the corner. I can then choose

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Windows 10 for Beginners

what other application I want to show in that half of the screen. So I'm going to say show my
PowerPoint presentation. And then I could do the same with Word.
I could pick that up and I could pull it up to the top corner of the screen, snap it in place, and
then I could have another application there if I wanted to. Now I don't tend to like to work like
this, I find the windows a bit too small. But if you do have much bigger screen or bigger
resolution, then you might find that particularly useful. And now this leads me on to my final
point in this module and that is closing down applications.
Now I have three things open on the screen, and I can simply click the cross to close down
Word, click the cross to close down PowerPoints. And I still have my Internet Explorer window
open. Another way that I could close this down is if I hover over Microsoft Edge in that Taskbar,
you can see I get that little window preview. If I move up, I have a lot of cross in the corner and I
can just click to close that down.
Another way that you can shut things down, and if I open up Microsoft Edge again, is if you like
using shortcut keys if you do Ctrl F4, and that will also close your window down.
So that's it for this module quite a lot to take in. as I said, do have a practice finding those
applications that you use frequently, and pinning them and organizing them on your Taskbar.
That's it for now, I will see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: User Accounts Basics

Deborah: Hi everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module, we're
going to talk about User Accounts. Now, earlier on, I mentioned that you can have multiple
different accounts. So you might need to set up one or more accounts on your PC or laptop so
that you can share it amongst other people.
So an example I would give there is if you have a PC at home, and there's multiple different
family members who use that PC, you can have a separate account for each person so that they
can log in and have access to all their own customizations and settings.
So in this module, we're going to cover the basics of Managing Accounts. I'm going to start out
by going through the User Account Settings. I'm going to speak to a little bit more about a
Microsoft Account versus a Local Account. I'm going to show you how you can create a new
Account on your PC. And then I'm going to show you how you can Delete User Accounts.
So on my particular laptop, I have two accounts set up on here. One is for myself, and another is
for a member of my family. And the two accounts that I have on this PC are set up in two
different ways. One of them is a Microsoft Account, and the other one is just a Local Account.
So I'm logged in as myself currently. And first thing we're going to do is just take a quick look at
my Settings.
So we're going to go down to our Start Menu, and we're going to click on the cog icon to jump to
our Settings. And we're going to jump straight into this Accounts section. So as I'm logged in as
me, this is where I can see all of my information about my account. So the first thing you can see
there is you can see a picture of myself, you can see the email address that I'm using here, and
you can see that I am an Administrator.
Now as I said, this is a Microsoft Account. So this is the account information that I would use to
log into Office 365, or Microsoft 365 as it is known these days. And you can see underneath, I
have a link to manage my Microsoft Account. So this is where I could manage all of my billing
information. Because if you remember, Microsoft 365 is a subscription package. And I can
manage all of my Settings surrounding my Microsoft Account.
You can also see here that I am an Administrator. So that means that basically I have access to
do pretty much anything on this laptop, it's the highest level of access that you can have. And
you might want to make multiple people Administrators or you might just want to have one
person, that's entirely up to you. But as an Administrator, you can do things like Add Other
Accounts, Delete Accounts, things like that.
You'll also notice that occasionally, in order to run an application with a high level of privileges,
so maybe you want to do something that could if done wrong, affect the running of your PC,
quite often you won't be able to run that unless you're logged in as Administrator. Now a couple
of other things we have on this page here, you can see it's telling me that I can sign in with a
Local Account instead if I want to. And then at the bottom, I can choose to change my picture.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So I have a camera option here. And I can also browse for a picture if I have one saved off to my
local drives. So this all comes under the Your Info tab in Settings.
Let's move down to Email and Accounts. So again, at the top here, you can see that I've got my
account, which is a Microsoft Account. But I also have the option to Add an account and we are
going to add an account in a moment. And you can see all the different options that you have,
you can set up a Microsoft Account or Google account, you can set up a Local Account, lots of
different kinds of accounts that you can create.
The next option down is Sign-in options. And this really allows you to control how you log into
your PC or laptop. And you can see, particularly with some of the newer laptops or PCs that
you'll buy, you'll have now these signing options will vary depending on the device that you're
using. So I have a very new laptop, so I pretty much have access to all of the different sign-in
options. For example, Windows Hello.
What Windows Hello allows you to do is instead of typing in a password or a pin to log into your
device, you can essentially use the camera on your laptop, which uses facial recognition to
recognize it's you and then it will log you in. So that's a really cool little feature. Now one that I
have set up on here is the one that I prefer actually and that is this Windows Hello Fingerprint.
So again, this may or may not apply to you. It really depends if you have a device that has an
inbuilt fingerprint scanner. Now mine does, it's just a little square, just underneath my number
pad. And basically, when I set up fingerprint scanning, it scanned my fingerprint and now to log
in, I can just place my finger on that little square and it will log me straight in. So it's really quick
and efficient.
It's also highly secure, because no two fingerprints are the same. So there's not too much of a
chance of anybody else being able to come along, put their finger on the pad and login to your
PC. So aside from those two new options, which you may or may not have access to on the
device that you're using, we have all of the other options as well. So you can choose to sign-in
with a Pin as opposed to a Password, you can sign-in with a physical Security key, you can have
a standard password, or you can even have a Picture Password as well. So a lot of sign-in options
there. And it's really down to you as to personal preference and also what your device is capable
of.
Now, if I wanted to do something as simple as resetting my password to log into this device,
because I'm using a Microsoft Account, if I scroll down to the bottom here, you can see that it
says “Changing your Microsoft Account password”. And that essentially is going to take me
through to Office 365 where I’ll need to change my password. And that's because I'm using a
Microsoft Account. You'll see it’s a little bit different when you're using a Local Account that
simply resides on this PC. But if you are looking for that option, you can jump to here, it's then
going to ask you to open up one of your web browsers. And it's going to take you to some
information which will talk you through how to change that password.
Now, I'm not going to go through all of these options over here. But I do want to jump across to
Family and Other users. And this is where I want to delve more into that Microsoft versus Local
Accounts. Now there's lots of advantages to logging in with a Microsoft Account. So for

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

example, this is the account that I use across all of the Microsoft products. So when I log into my
laptop using my Microsoft Account, and I open up applications like Excel, and Word, it's all tied
together, it's all logged in under my same Microsoft Account. And I have easy access to things
like OneDrive, my files, and it's just a very consistent way of working for me.
Now, it might be that you don't necessarily want that maybe you don't particularly use OneDrive
or anything along those lines, and you're happy just to have an account which you log into on the
PC so you can surf the web and do various different bits. And that is where you might want to
use a Local Account. Now I want to show you a common mistake that people make when they're
trying to add a new account. They'll come into here, into Email and Accounts. And you'll see that
you have an Add Account button at the top.
Now this is where you would go if you wanted to add an account that's connected to another
application. So if you want to add an account for someone who has a Google account, you can do
that from here. If they have an iCloud account, you can do that from here. If they have an Office
account, you can do that from here. But what if the person that you want to add, maybe you don't
know what their login details are, maybe you don't know if they have an Office account or a
Gmail account. What if you simply just want to set up a new profile, a new account on your
laptop without having to type in their email address and password details? That is where you
would go down to Family and Other users.
Now again, if you want to add a family member, you can add a family member up here. And it
says; “Add your family so everybody gets their own sign in and their own desktop”. So
essentially, people can customize what their desktop looks like. And then it says; “you can help
kids stay safe with appropriate websites, time limits, apps and games”. So if that sounds like an
option that would be useful for you, you can add a family member account from there.
At the bottom we have Other users and it says; “allow people who are not part of your family to
sign in with their own accounts. And this won't add them to your family”. And you can see there
that I set up Ben Lee as a Local Account. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to log in as
Ben so you can see some of the differences that we have.
So I've now logged in as Ben and Ben has a Local Account. And you can see immediately that
it's very much personal to Ben so he has his own desktop background completely independent of
my account. He has his own Desktop Icons. And if we jump down into the Start Menu, you'll see
that his tiles look a lot different to mine. He has different tiles available. And if we jump up into
Settings and go into Accounts, you'll see that it says Local Account underneath there. And it is
also worth noting that if you set up Local Account, you can switch that to a Microsoft Account
simply by signing in with a Microsoft Account instead. So basically all of his settings are
independent to his profile. So, I can't then go in and try and access something like OneDrive
because I'm not logged in with a Microsoft Account.
Now what I'm going to do next, I'm going to show you how to set up a new account, it's a super
simple process, we're going to create a Local Account on this PC. So I'm going to log back in as
myself, and I'm going to show you how to do that. So I'm now logged back in as myself. And
we're going to run through the process of creating a Local Account on this machine. And the

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Windows 10 for Beginners

process is very simple. We're going to go back into the Start Menu, and we're going to jump into
Settings, and we're going to go back to Accounts.
Now this is a Local Account that I want to set up so I'm going to go to Family and Other users,
and I'm going to select “Add someone else to this PC”. Now it's going to pop up and
automatically ask you for this person's Microsoft information. Now, if you just want to set up a
Local Account, you don't have their email address or anything like that, just click on; “I don't
have this person's sign-in information”. And once again, it's going to try and get you to create an
account on Microsoft.
Now if you don't want to do that, we just select; “add a user without a Microsoft Account”. And
you can now just type in those basic details. So I'm going to add Vicki Matthews. And I'm going
to give her a password. And then you'll need to complete three security questions in case you
forget the password. So, I'm going to do that. I'm then going to click Next. And I'll see you in a
moment. And there we go. It's as simple as that. Vicki Matthews now has a Local Account on
this machine. And all I simply need to do is to send her her login details, and she can log in to
this PC.
Now removing an account is pretty simple as well. So again, if I select Vicki Matthews, you can
see I have an option to change account type. So if I wanted to switch her to a Microsoft Account,
I could do that. Or I can select Remove. It gives you a little warning saying that all of her data
and any customization she's made are going to be deleted. Now I'm okay with that. I've just
added this account, I know I can delete this fairly safely. And there you go. She's gone. So very
simple to set up users and delete them.
That's it for this module. In the next module, we're going to be doing our first exercise so please
join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 01

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to our course on Windows 10. We've made it
down to our first exercise, exercise one. And in exercise one, you're going to need to use some
sample image files that we have saved off in the Exercise Folder. So make sure that you do have
that folder downloaded to your PC, so that you can access these files.
Now I've actually logged out as myself. And I've logged in as Ben Lee, who, if you remember
has a Local Account on this machine. And I can see here that Ben has set up the Weather app.
He's chosen his location of London, England, and we can see the weather there. And then on the
right-hand side, he has opened a browser, and he's actually looking at the Wikipedia page for
Game of Thrones.
So what I'd like you to do in this exercise is I want you to practice creating a Local Account on
your PC, I want you to set up the Weather app for your location, I want you to open up any other
application. So it could be something like an Edge browser like I have here, or something else
entirely. And I want you to practice snapping those windows to either side of the screen. And if
you've done that successfully, it should look something similar to mine.
Now I'm just going to jump into Ben's accounts, we're going to go to Settings, and we're going to
click on Accounts. And you can see that I've set Ben up using one of those image files that you'll
find in that Exercise Files Folder. So what I want you to do is go in, I want you to add a picture
from that folder. And just as a little additional thing that you might want to do on the end of this
exercise.
If you do have more than one account on your PC, then just practice going through that
switching users and login process. So that is it for exercise one, I will see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Help and Support

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to explore some of the options that you have with regards to Help and Support. So
we're going to start out by taking a look at the Virtual Assistant, I'm going to show you the Tips
App. And then I'm going to refer you to the Microsoft Support Page.
Now as a general rule, there is no Help as such within Windows 10, at least help in the context of
other applications you might have used, such as Excel or Word. But there are a number of
facilities available within Windows 10, which can help you out a lot if you're stuck on
something, or if you're looking for more information about something. Now, something that was
really helpful in slightly older versions of Windows 10, than the one I'm currently running is that
they had a really useful Get Started app, which contained lots of topics and tutorials and videos.
And I found that really, really helpful. But it seems that that has now been removed and replaced
with a couple of other alternatives.
So I'm going to click on my Windows key. Now I'm going to scroll down to G, which is where it
Get Started used to be found, and you'll see that instead, we have this Get Help area. And if we
click on that, it's basically going to take us into this Virtual Assistant where we can talk to a
virtual agents. Now programs like this, in general are running some kind of artificial intelligence,
you may like this kind of thing, you may not. But I would say have a lot of play around with it,
see how you feel about it, you might find that it's something that you rely on quite a lot when it
comes to getting help.
So for example, I'm going to type a question in here and see if the virtual agent can answer it. So
I'm going to say; “create a new account”, and hit Enter. I can see that she's typing away. And she
says, “Which one did you mean? Add or remove an account on Windows 10, create a Local
Account or administrator account or none of the above”. So that's actually pretty helpful. I want
to create a Local Account let's say, so I can click on that link. And immediately the help page
guiding me through how I would do this pops up. I'm going to give her a little bit of feedback,
I'm going to say; “yes, that did solve my problem”. And she's now saying; “great, you can ask
me another question”.
So really, what this does is it takes your input, and it pulls back the relevant help pages. So
virtual assistant is definitely one to have a little play around with if you're stuck on a particular
thing. Now something else we have in here, which might help you out a little bit. If we press the
Windows key again and this time, I'm going to go to my keypad. And I'm going to click on T for
Tips. And you'll see that there is actually an app that's called Tips. And if we open that up, you
can see that we have lots of different Windows 10 tips. They’re divided down into categories. So
you can see what's new, something that's very appropriate at the moment is; “Tips on how to
work remotely”. So let's have a quick look at that.
So it's talking me through some tips to collaborate and save into OneDrive or save my files to the
cloud. And I can scroll through these different tips. So those can be quite useful as well. And you
can scroll through and there's lots and lots of different categories that we have in here. And here

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Windows 10 for Beginners

we have; “Getting started with Windows 10”. So again, we have nine useful tips. So these are
worth having little scroll through, particularly if you're very new to Windows 10. And even from
within this app, you have a little magnifying glass in the top, which will allow you to search so
let's say; “create a theme”. There we go. And I've got some tips relating to my search item.
Now if you think that's going to be super useful, and you want to either pin this to your Taskbar
or your Start Menu, remember if you just right-click in the Taskbar, you have a Pin to Taskbar
option. Similarly, if you wanted to pin that to your Start Menu, which I'm actually going to do,
let's jump down to Tips again, by clicking on T. I'm going to right-click and you can see here I
have an option Pin to Start. And there it is just there, set up as a new tile. So you've got Virtual
Assistant and you have the Tips app to help you.
Now the final resource I'm going to show you is probably the one that I use most often. And that
is simply just jumping on to the Microsoft support site and you can see the URL at the top there;
support.microsoft.com and this is a wealth of information. Their library is enormous and pretty
much anything you need to do, anything you need help with, you can find in here. So you can
use this Search bar at the top. And anything you type in here will search through every help
topic. So if I was to type something reasonably generic like tables, that could mean, I want to
create a table in Excel, I might want to create a table in Word, I might want to create a table in
Outlook, it's going to search across all of those. And if you want to be a little bit more specific,
you can go into the individual application before typing in your search term.
So I'm going to say More Microsoft products. And I'm going to select Windows 10, because
that's what I need help with. And hopefully at the top here, it says; “select your products”. So
we've got windows 10. But if you are an in Windows 8.1 user or 7, then you still have some help
files available to you. And again, these help files are all divided down into categories. So Internet
and Storage I'm currently in, I've got some tips to improve my PC performance. And then I have
all of my individual categories at the bottom there. So again, it really depends exactly what it is
that I'm looking for help on. But this is a wealth of information this website, and something I
would definitely have bookmarked in your browser, so that you can quickly jump there and
access the wealth of information.
Now at the top here, we have this menu running across. So if I click on what's new, this is a nice
area, because it's going to show me everything that's been updated in Windows 10 recently. So
Windows 10 is always being updated, and it's good to sort of keep on top of those changes so
you can really get on board with anything new that's released. And another tab that I find quite
good in here is this Community tab. So this essentially takes you through into the Microsoft
Community Forum. And there is a huge community of Microsoft users. A lot of the time if I
have a question that's quite tricky, it's always worth jumping onto the community forum, posting
it, and guaranteed somebody is going to come up with something that's either gonna help you
out, fix your problem, or just give you a lot more information than you knew prior to making the
post.
You can scroll through the topics, you can click on them to read, and you can make a post if you
need to. So that is it. So whilst there isn't a dedicated Help app within Windows 10, you do have

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

numerous features between the Virtual Assistant, the Tips app and that Microsoft Support Page.
That should be enough to help you out with any questions that you have when it comes to
working with Windows 10. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Windows Update

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be taking a look at Windows updates. So I'm going to start out by running you
through some of the Basics of Updating Windows, we're then going to look at some of the
Advanced Options that you have. And then finally, we're going to take a look at how you can
keep all your Apps Updated. But first, let's start out with those Windows Update Basics.
Now, your Windows 10 system will update automatically, but you do have some options and
also some control. So let's jump down to our Start Menu, and we're going to head straight for
Settings. And right at the bottom, the last option in the list is Update and Security. And this is
where you'll find all of your Windows updates. So you can see this first page that I get to here,
it's telling me all of the updates that are currently available for my PC. And you can see that
they're all showing as pending install. And I have quite a few here in my list.
Now the way that this works is that all of these updates will automatically install. So if I do
nothing, these updates are going to install themselves. And you can see right at the bottom there,
it says; “we’ll automatically install updates when you aren't using your device. Or you can install
them now if you want”. So if I want to just get them out of the way, maybe I've got a spare hour
where I'm not doing so much. Or maybe I'm going to a meeting and I want to get those updates
installed, I can just click the Install Now button to install all of them now. Otherwise, Windows
is going to select a time when I'm not using my device in order to install those for me.
Now you do have some other options underneath which gives you a little bit of control as to
when these updates are installed. So if you wanted to, you could pause your updates for seven
days. So again, maybe if you're working on some kind of project, or maybe doing something like
I'm doing here, a Windows course, maybe I want to make sure that my system doesn't change too
dramatically whilst I'm writing this course, so I might want to pause any updates for seven days.
And you can see here it says; “visit Advanced Options to change that pause period”.
So maybe you want to pause it for longer than that, you can do that from this Advanced Options
area at the bottom there. You can also change your active hours. So a lot of the time, the
download and install of updates is invisible to you. So you don't get any indication on the screen
that updates are actually being installed in the background. But sometimes once updates have
been installed, a restart is needed. And sometimes that's not particularly convenient, particularly
if you're in the middle of your working day and you can't really afford to restart your PC and
maybe wait 10 to 15 minutes in order for all of those updates to finish installing.
So in order to ensure that your updates are installed when you're not using your device, you can
change your active hours. So what you can do is you can set your active hours to let Windows
know when you typically use this device. So if you're particularly busy between nine and five,
then you can change your active hours to that time period, and Windows won't install updates
during that time. So you can see here mine is set from eight till five and I have a little change
link there if I need to change that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

If I want to look at updates that I've installed previously, I can view my Update History. And you
also have an option to Uninstall Updates. So maybe you've noticed that an update that was
installed yesterday is causing some problems with your system, you can essentially uninstall that
update and roll your system back. And then finally at the bottom, we have Advanced Options.
Now in here we have a few other options. So at the top there it says; “receive updates for other
Microsoft products when you update Windows”. Now I like to have this turned on because it's
really important to me to make sure all of my other applications such as Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, Outlook, are all kept up to date constantly.
So, I like to receive any updates for those applications when Windows is being updated as well.
So, I have that option toggled on. Now I'm not going to go through all of the options that we
have in here. But what I will highlight is this; “restart this device as soon as possible when a
restart is required to install an update”. Now as I was saying, sometimes when updates occur, the
system will restart and then after that restart, there might be a number of things that Windows
has to do to make that system usable. So, your system can be out of action for a little while.
Now again, if you want to have some kind of control as to when that happens, so maybe you
don't want it to happen in the middle of the day when you're super busy and you don't have the
time to wait for those updates, I would leave this option toggled off. Because, you don't want it
to restart the device as soon as possible. So definitely check those Advanced Options as well
when it comes to how you're managing your updates.
Now when it comes to updating any apps that you have on your PC, and again, those of us that
use mobile phones that have apps on them, we're probably fairly used to that process of updating
our apps. And it works in a very similar way in Windows. So I'm going to jump across to the
Microsoft Store. And if you want to see if any of your apps need updating, if you click on the
three dots in the top right-hand corner, the top option you have there is Downloads and Updates.
And this is going to do a quick check of all your applications, and it's going to see if any of them
require an update.
And you can see there at the top, I have three apps that have updates available. And it's a very
simple process of just clicking the, “update all button” in order to update those. And if you want
to check for any updates, you have the “get updates” button at the top there. And that will just
essentially do a refresh. And if anything new needs to be updated, it's going to be added to that
list at the top. And you can see there as I've clicked that button, we have one of them
automatically downloading and then the others require me to manually install them.
Now another thing to check up here is if we click on those three dots, again, let's jump into
Settings for our Microsoft Store because there are some features in here which also relate to
updates. You can see the top one there, “Update apps automatically”, I have that turned on. And
you just saw one of those apps that updates automatically. So I have Update apps automatically
turned on. And I do recommend that you do have that turned on, because that's just going to
make everything a lot more efficient. And I also have “Show products on tile turned on”.
Now we haven't really spoken too much about Live Tiles so let's just talk about that for one
moment. I'm going to click the cross to come out of here, and I'm going to go back to my tiles.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now I didn't have this turned on on too many of my tiles. But one thing that I do have turned on
is on the Weather tile. This is showing live updates. So you can see that tile is kind of moving,
it's refreshing. And so is that News tile. So this is what we call Live Tiles. And if you don't like
that, some people find it quite distracting, you can right-click go to More and say “turn live tile
off”. So that's pretty much it when it comes to how you can manage and handle your updates.
The key takeaway here is that Windows updates will automatically install, but it's very important
that you go in and you check your settings to make sure that they're installing at a time that's
convenient for you. And when it comes to App updates, again, as long as you have that setting
turned on, those apps will update automatically.
Alternatively, you can just click the button to install them manually from the Downloads and
Updates section in the Windows Store. Fairly straightforward. Thanks for listening guys. I will
see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 3 – Working in Desktop Mode

Video: Working in Desktop Mode

Deborah: Hi guys, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module, we're going
to talk a little bit more about working in Desktop Mode. Now apps run in Desktop Mode. And
for many people, Desktop Mode is the mode used most of the time unless you're utilizing a tablet
device.
And just a recap of something we learned earlier. If you click all the way down in the bottom
right-hand corner and click on the Action Center, if you need to switch into Tablet Mode, you
have the option to do so from here. So it's a very quick toggle on, toggle off. So in this module,
I'm going to give you an overview of the Windows 10 Desktop, we're going to take a look at
Managing your Desktop Icons, I'm going to show you something called Peek and Show. I'm
going to show you how you can Utilize Multiple Desktops. So let's start out by reviewing some
of the options that we have on the Windows 10 Desktop.
Now, as I've mentioned before, if we look at the Taskbar at the bottom, we can see any
applications that we currently have running based on the fact that they have a blue line
underneath them. And whichever one we have open on top, that one is referred to as the Active
task. Now a couple of other things that we haven't mentioned yet so far, again, down here in that
Notifications area, you'll see that we have this little keyboard icon and this is the touch keyboard.
So obviously, if you don't have a touch enabled device, you can actually still use this by clicking
on the number pad using your mouse. But this is primarily designed for people who have touch
screens or some kind of touch device, you can type things using your finger.
Now your desktop may look a bit different to mine, the aspect ratio might be different. So for
example, I'm using a wide screen, you might also have a different background image to me. And
of course, you can personalize this to your own tastes. And we're going to talk a lot more about
how you can really personalize it, set up the images you want to use, the themes, the colors, all
of those kinds of things in later modules.
Now when it comes to managing our Desktop Icons, if you recall, again, we spoke about these
very briefly in a previous module. I don't tend to have too many icons on my desktop, I don't
really like a really busy looking Desktop. I prefer to pin all my most frequently used applications
to the Taskbar. However, I do have three icons up there, I have my Recycle Bin because I find
that quite useful to be able to jump to really quickly. I have my Microsoft Edge browser. And I
also have a link to Camtasia, which is the app I use to record these videos.
Now the only reason that I have Microsoft Edge and Camtasia on my desktop is because I've
recently downloaded those and Windows automatically creates that desktop shortcut for me. So
in reality, what I would probably do is come in and delete those shortcuts because I already have
those applications pinned to my Taskbar. But for demonstration purposes in this module, I'm
going to leave them just there.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

I will say though, that despite my preference for adding things to the Taskbar, if you look at
mine, you can see my Taskbar is pretty much full up. If I wanted to start adding other icons is
going to start getting a little bit busy looking. There is a lot more space on your desktop. So it
might be that you want to move some of those shortcuts onto the desktop if you find yourself
running out room on that Taskbar. Now let's take a look at some of the customizations you can
do for these desktop shortcuts. And that's all they are, you can see that they have a little arrow on
them. Basically means it's just a way of pointing you to the location where this particular
application is stored.
And the reason why that is important is because sometimes people think that if you delete a
shortcut from this desktop, it deletes the entire application. Don't worry, it doesn't, it simply
deletes that shortcut link. So let's take a look at some of the other things that we can do to
customize these icons and our desktop. So I'm going to right-click my mouse anywhere on that
empty desktop. And you'll see the top option there is View. So this lets me customize how large I
have those icons. So at the moment I have them as Medium. If I wanted to do them as Large you
can see they're extremely big, a bit too big there. Or you have small in there as well. So again,
entirely up to you how you want to have the sizing on those icons. I like mine at medium.
So let's right-click again, and we have a Sort by option. So this allows you to arrange your
Desktop Icons in a more logical sequence. So it might be that you want to arrange them by Name
or Size or Item type or the Date that they were modified. So the most recently installed or used
would be at the top. You can also rearrange them yourself. So just by clicking and dragging these
icons, it might be that I decide I want them running horizontally across the screen, as opposed to
vertically down the screen, I can simply use my mouse to click and drag. And if you're using a
touch device, you would use your finger to do the same thing.
Now, the icons that you see in Windows 10, in general, are standard Windows icons. And they're
the same for everybody. So everybody will have the same icon for File Explorer, everybody will
have the same icon for Recycle Bin by default. But you can actually change these icons if you
want to. So again, if we right-click on our desktop background, and jump down to the
Personalize area, and this is an area we're going to be in and out of throughout the proceeding
sections. Now I want you to jump down to the Theme section. And we're going to ignore all of
this at the moment and go right down to the bottom, where it says this little link here Desktop
Icon settings.
Now these Desktop Icons with the checkboxes next to them, these are like your standard
Windows Desktop Icons. And you can see that I only have one of them checked, because I'm
only showing the Recycle Bin on my desktop, I don't have my Computer or Network or Control
Panel or anything like that. But if you wanted to, you could take these if you wanted to see more
of them. So again, if I click on Computer and click on Ok, and just move this window out the
way, you can see I now have that Desktop Icon that's been created, which jumps me straight to
this PC in File Explorer. So let's jump back into that link. And I'm going to untick Computer
because I don't want that on there.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now another thing you have in here is if you do want to change the icon for any of these, maybe
you want something else for your Recycle Bin, you do have the option to select it, and then you
have Change icon. And it will take you into this little array of icons that Windows provides. And
you can change that to something that you like a little bit better. So just be aware that you can
turn on and turn off those Windows standard icons to add them to your desktop. And you can
also change that icon if you want to.
Now a lot of applications when you install them will have their own assigned icon. So I'm in File
Explorer at the moment. And you can see here that I have access to my OneDrive Cloud Storage.
And that comes with its own little blue cloud icon. Now if I wanted to make OneDrive a shortcut
on my desktop, all I need to do is right-click, go down to Send to, and one of the options I have
there is Desktop, Create shortcut. So if I select that, you can now see that that's added that to my
desktop.
Another way that you can add items as a desktop shortcut icon is if we go into the Start Menu,
and let me grab something like let's just grab this Calculator, you can click, drag, and drop. And
that will very quickly create a little link for you as well. And if you want to remove any of these,
the simple process of right-clicking, you have the Delete option in there. And as I mentioned
before, it doesn't delete the application, it just deletes that shortcut. So a good little exercise for
you now, it's just a practice adding and removing items to and from your desktop.
Now another really useful feature of Windows 10 is the Peek feature. And you've probably seen
a little sneak preview of this as we've been going through the course so far. So if you have
several applications open and you want to access something on your desktop, but you can't see
the desktop. So currently, I have Microsoft Edge web browser taking up the entire screen, I can't
see anything else other than that. If I wanted to jump to an Excel spreadsheet that I have open,
instead of going through and minimizing down each window I have opened to try and find what
I'm looking for, a real quick way of doing it is to hover over the icon so in this case, Excel. And
it's going to give me a little preview of all of the Excel spreadsheets that I currently have open.
And you can see I have three of them open. If I want to switch to one in particular, I can just
hover my mouse over it and click to select. And that essentially pulls it to the front. So this is a
really nice feature. I use this all the time when I'm working with lots of different open documents
in order to be able to move about efficiently.
Now another option I want to speak to you about is using Multiple Desktops. So might be that
you have lots of different applications open. You can see here I've got a few different Excel
windows open, and I want to arrange them in a certain way. Now if I jump down to the Taskbar
and we need to right-click on the Taskbar, there is an option in here to Cascade Windows. And
that kind of arranges them in a slightly better way. So if I want to pull one to the front, I can click
on the bar, and that will bring that one to the front.
Now I will say this isn't an option that I use particularly frequently, I don't find it the most
efficient way of working, but some people really like it. So just remember that you have access
to it in that right-click menu in the task bar. Now, if you're someone who really does work with
lots and lots of different apps, and constantly has lots of things open, so much so that your

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

desktop is really getting full up, it's hard to switch between applications because you have so
many things open, an option that you might want to explore is Creating a second desktop.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back down to my Taskbar, and you'll see that we have
an icon there, which is just to the left of my Google Chrome, and that is Task View, we did go
into this earlier. But if I click it, it shows me all of my open applications in a way that's easy for
me to see all in one go. Now, one thing that you may not have noticed in this window is right at
the top, we have an option for New Desktop. So if I click New Desktop, it allows me to have a
second desktop and you can certainly switch between them.
So Desktop 1 contains all of the applications I currently have open. And I can now have a
completely different desktop, which has nothing running. So essentially, this is almost like
having two different computers. So if you find that you're running out of space on one desktop,
don't forget you have the option to create another one. And you can open up as many
applications as you like. Switching between them again is just a simple case of going to Task
View and switching between your different desktops.
If you decide you no longer need one, if you hover over, in this case, Desktop 2, you have that
little cross to get rid of that desktop. So again, a really nice way of managing your windows if
you're someone who has loads and loads of things open at any given time.
All right, everyone, that is all we have on working in Desktop Mode for this module. In the next
module, we're going to be taking a little bit more of a look at managing and using the Taskbar.
So please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Managing and Using the Taskbar

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to our course on Windows 10. We're still down in
section three. And in this module, we're going to be talking about how to manage and use the
Taskbar.
So we're going to start out by walking through the Taskbar Contents, I'm going to show you
some options that you have within Taskbar Settings. We're going to look at Taskbar Toolbars.
And finally, we're going to look at Taskbar Contents. So let's start out by taking a look at our
Taskbar Contents.
Now this is something that we've touched on in previous modules, we're going to go into a little
bit more depth in this module and look at some of the features that we haven't yet discussed. So
firstly, let's move down over to the left-hand side of the Taskbar. And you can see that we have a
box there that says; “Type here to search’. So this is your Search bar. If you're looking for
anything on your PC, you can come in here you can type your search term, and it's going to go
away and find it. So that might be an application, that might be an app, that might be even a
setting. So this is essentially a universal search that searches for your keyword across everything
on your PC. And that also includes things like files and documents as well.
Now we have a whole section dedicated to searching. So I'm just going to leave that there for
now. Now, just to the left of that where you can see that little circle, this is Cortana. So Cortana
would be something similar to Siri, if you have an apple mobile phone, or even something like
Amazon's Alexa device. It uses Speech Recognition so you can talk to Cortana, you can ask her
questions, and you can get her to deliver the answer to you. And again, we're going to do a demo
of this in a later module.
But just so you know, if you want to start up Cortana and ask her a question, that is the button
that you can click on in order to do that. And it's worth noting at this stage if you don't happen to
see that Cortana button there, if you right-click on your Taskbar, you can see that you have an
option there; “Show Cortana button”. So if you don't have that ticked, then you're not going to
see it. So just make sure you have a little tick next to that option.
Now we've already talked about our Taskbar icons in quite a lot of detail. So I'm going to move
straight across again to this Notifications area. So my Notifications area is kind of full at the
moment. And if I click this little up arrow, it’s going to show me all of the little icons that there
isn't space for in my notifications area. So don't forget in that up arrow, you'll have other little
icons in there as well.
Now one thing you can do to give yourself a little bit more space in this Taskbar area is if you
right-click your mouse, you can see there's an option there that I currently have ticked and that
says; “Lock the Taskbar”. So it locks it into its position, the position that it's in now, and it
doesn't let me make it any bigger or any smaller.
Now if you turn this off, so let's just uncheck that option. What that means is I can now grab this
Taskbar, and you can see I get that double headed arrow, I can drag it up, and it gives me more

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

room on my Taskbar. So if I then wanted to click the up arrow, I could drag one of my little
notifications that hasn't had enough room to go on that Notifications area, And I could drag it
and drop it down onto my Taskbar. Similarly, if I want to remove something, I can drag and I
can drop it back to where it was.
Now if you have a wider Taskbar, that also gives you more room to place your Taskbar icon. So
again, if you're somebody who doesn't like having them split between the Taskbar and the
desktop, you might choose to do this, have a slightly bigger Taskbar, and put more of your
applications on it. Now this isn't something that I particularly like to do, I like to be able to see
the greatest amount of my screen so I tend to keep my Taskbar locked.
Now as you can probably imagine with these Notification icons, you can drag them about in
order to rearrange them. So if I want to move my OneDrive, I can just click and drag that icon
and it moves it around. So, you can rearrange those icons, set them up how you want. Now other
options that you have with regards to the Taskbar if we right-click on the Taskbar again, you can
see at the top here we have certain items checked. So we just came in here and I told you about
checking that Cortana button.
But you also have the option to Hide or Show the Task View button, which is this little icon
down here, which allows us to get an overview of all the applications we're running and all also
create multiple desktops if we want to. If you find you never use that option, that might be
something that you don't want to show to give yourself a bit more room on that Taskbar. Now, I
also have “Show touch keyboard button” showing. And another cool little one is Show touchpad
button. So if I click that, you can see I now get this little touchpad.
And this essentially mimics a mouse if you're using a touch device. So you can see there you
have your mouse area. So you can see there you have your mouse buttons. And you can utilize
that in a very similar way. Now, I don't particularly need that so I'm just going to turn that off. So
the other important option in here to know about is Taskbar settings. So this is where you can
really come in and modify exactly how that Taskbar is managed.
So you can see again, we have Lock the Taskbar, I have that turned on. And these are all little
toggle sliders, so it makes it very easy to enable or disable certain elements of your Taskbar. I
could choose to automatically hide the Taskbar completely in Desktop Mode. So if I was to turn
that on, you can see my Taskbar has now disappeared. Now I don't particularly like this option, I
always like to see my Taskbar in general. But if you don't, you can turn that on, I'm going to turn
mine back off. And if you use a tablet device, you have the same option there as well. You have
an option of using small Taskbar buttons. So if I turn that on, you can see they then become very
tiny.
Now this is another really great way if you like to have lots and lots of things pinned to that
Taskbar that gives you a lot more space. And I'm going to turn mine off. Now that Peek feature
that we spoke about earlier, if you remember when you hover over it gives you a little preview of
whatever you have open for that particular application. If you don't like that for some reason, and
some people do not, you can choose to turn that off just here as well. Now a couple of other
options I want to highlight in here. This Taskbar location, so by default, your Taskbar is going to

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Windows 10 for Beginners

be across the bottom of your screen. And for 99.9% of people this is adequate. It's very, very rare
that I see somebody who has their Taskbar located somewhere else.
But you do have some options, I could place it at the top of my screen, which puts it up there.
Now that looks incredibly strange to me, because I have been using it with the Taskbar at the
bottom for years and years. You could also choose to put it on the left or the right of the screen.
Now, as I said, I prefer on the bottom, but it's very much personal preference. Now something
else that you have is this Combine Taskbar buttons and I have mine set to; “Always hide labels”.
Now if I was to change this to Never, just look down in the Taskbar what happens when I select
this option. Now I've got quite a lot on there. So this option is a little bit pointless. But if you did
have less apps pinned to your Taskbar, it's going to show you the name of that application next to
it as well. So again, that might be something that you find particularly useful if you find it quite
difficult distinguishing between the different applications purely based on the icon. So I like to
say; “Always hide labels”. So a few options in there for you to definitely check out and
customize.
Now another option you have in here is this Show Desktop option. Now this is particularly
useful again, if you have a lot of things open on your screen, and you want to quickly just jump
back to your plain old desktop, then clicking this icon will minimize everything that you have
open and just show you your desktop. Now there is also a keyboard shortcut for this as well. And
that is Windows Key D. that will take you back to your desktop and minimize everything down
into your Taskbar whenever you press that option. Now also staying on that theme. If we right-
click and go up to Toolbars right at the top, you have an option here for desktop as well, which
works slightly differently to the one we've just looked at.
So if I click desktop, you'll see now in the Taskbar, I get this little Desktop option, and there's
two little arrows moving off to the right-hand side. If I click that, it essentially allows me to
navigate around my desktop. So if I want to select a file from OneDrive, I can select OneDrive, I
can go to Documents and it's going to show me all of my folders. So I can go through and
essentially it's like working in File Explorer, but from your Taskbar. So that might be another
little option that you quite like to have down on your Taskbar. Now again, I don't particularly
like this option. So I'm going to jump back in and I'm just going to turn off that Desktop feature.
Now the final thing I want to talk to you about in a Taskbar settings is if we right-click and jump
back into Taskbar settings, let's scroll down to this little Notifications area. So here, we can
select which icons appear on the Taskbar. Or we can turn System Icons on or off. So let's go into
select which icons appear. And you can see here, this is where we can customize what icons we
actually see down in this Notifications area. And again, these are just slider toggles. So you can
see the ones that I have turned on.
So I can see my microphone, I can see my Wi-Fi network, I can see my OneDrive, my Power
and my Volume. And then I have many of these turned off because they're not of particular
interest to me, I don't need to see them all the time. So definitely go in there and review what you
can see on that Taskbar Notifications area.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So that is it in relation to the Taskbar and that Notifications area, have a little practice with that,
play around, modify the things that you can see in that Notifications area. I'm really good at set
up so that you're seeing the information that is important to you. In the next module we're going
to talk about using that Search box and also Cortana so please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: The Search box and Cortana

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to explore how to utilize the Search box, and also Cortana. And both of these are
kind of used for similar purposes.
So first, we're going to look at how you can utilize the Search box to basically find anything on
your PC, be it a file, an application, an app, a desktop program, or maybe even something on the
web. And then I'm going to show you how you can utilize Cortana, which is going to allow you
to search using your voice. So first up, let's look at the Search box.
The Search box is located down in that Taskbar area over on the left-hand side. And it's very
obvious, it says; “Type here to search”. And this is a universal search, meaning that it's going to
search through everything on your laptop, and also the web, depending on your search term. So
if I click in the Search box, and I start to type what I'm looking for, so let's say that I'm looking
for the Paint application, I'm going to type in P. And you'll see as I start typing, Windows is
already running a search. So now it's showing me the most relevant items related to the letter P.
And the first thing I have there is Power and Sleep settings.
Now obviously, the more that you type the word, the more accurate it gets. So if I type in the
entire word paint, you can see there that the best match is the Paint app. And then I also have
some other apps there Paint 3D. Now I can refine my search a little bit more. You can see just
above currently, the blue underline is underneath where it says all so that's literally searching
everything for the keyword paint. However, if I'm only interested in searching for an app called
Paint, I could select Apps. What about if I have a document that contains the word paint, I can
search for it that way.
Or alternatively, I can click on the web just to see any web results for the word paint. And then I
have more options at the side here I can search through Email, Folders, my Music library,
Contacts, Photos, all things like that. Now for the moment, I'm going to stick with all and once
it's found your item, you can just click on it to open up that particular application. Now you can
also use the Search box if you're looking for a particular file. So if I type in “sales”, for example,
you can see the best match there is the sales_2017 Excel file that I have there. And then I have
some search results from the web related to my search term. And then some more documents
listed underneath.
Now I can also use the Search box to search for websites. If I type in Wikipedia, you can see
there, best match Wikipedia. I can select it, and it's going to jump me straight to the search
results. And Wikipedia is the top one up there. I can also search for folders. So if I'm looking for
a particular folder within File Explorer, I can type that in. And you can see there the best match
is my Course Files Folder. So really powerful, really nice universal search. And I will say that if
I'm looking for something on my PC, I always use the Search bar as opposed to coming into the
Start Menu and scrolling through looking for whatever it is that I want to look for, even if I'm
looking for a particular setting.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So for example, if I wanted to know how to adjust the brightness on my PC, I would type in,
“adjust brightness”. And you can see there, best match Ease of Access brightness setting, and it's
going to jump me straight to that particular item within settings. So I find this super useful. And
let's get on to speaking a little bit about Cortana. Because Cortana is pretty exciting. As I
mentioned before, she's very similar to something like Siri if you're used to using Siri on your
mobile phone, and also very similar to something like the Amazon Alexa device.
So Cortana is there as kind of a virtual assistant activated by your voice. And she's there to help
you find things on your PC, search things on the web, and also answer any questions that you
have. Now if you've never used Cortana before, it's definitely worth jumping on to the Microsoft
site and looking for Cortana. So you can see that the URL is just microsoft.com/Cortana, where
you'll have a really useful video which will walk you through some of the main elements of
using Cortana. So let's just take a moment to review this video.
Now one important thing when it comes to utilizing Cortana is that she needs to be able to
understand your voice. So it's very important that you do speak clearly. And I will say that
Cortana does improve, the more you use it. Now, I will say that you also kind of need to know
how to structure and ask your questions so that she can understand you and provide you with the
best results since this does take a little bit of practice. But as long as you keep your sentences
fairly simple and you speak them clearly, then you should find that she's quite useful to you.
Now there are a few settings when it comes to Cortana that are worth reviewing. So what I'm
going to do is I'm going to utilize the Search bar at the bottom, and I'm going to type in Cortana.
And you can see my top option there is Cortana permissions, which is going to jump me into my
settings for Cortana. Now I'm going to go to this “Talk to Cortana option”. Now a couple of
things I want to point out in here. Now when you're utilizing Cortana, you can just say your
question, and she will reply to you.
However, you can set it so that Cortana responds to “Hey Cortana”. And if you set this, it says;
“Cortana will always respond to Hey Cortana even when your device is asleep”. And it's also
worth mentioning that Cortana uses more battery life when this is on because she's essentially
always listening for the words Hey Cortana. So my personal preference is to have this turned off.
You can also invoke Cortana by using a keyboard shortcut, which is the Windows logo key + C.
And you can choose if you want Cortana to be able to listen to you even when your device is
locked.
Now I actually have that turned on, because sometimes I might be away from my PC. And I
might need to ask a question. So I like to just be able to say my question without unlocking my
entire machine. Now when it comes to setting up your language, it says here; “Cortana works
best when the language you select here matches the region on your device”. And it says; “at the
moment Cortana is using English United Kingdom. But if you wanted to change that you can
choose a different one”.
Now if you want some tips about how to structure questions, how to chat with Cortana, there is a
link at the bottom here which is going to take you through to a web page which will give you
some useful tips when it comes to interacting with Cortana. Now probably the most important

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

option here is right at the top, it's your microphone, you want to make sure that Cortana can hear
you. So it's worth just testing out Cortana to make sure that she can hear you.
Now currently, I have an external microphone plugged into this device so I can record this video.
But otherwise, I would have that unplugged and it would just be utilizing the microphone that's
built into my laptop. So if you find that when you start up Cortana and nothing happens, it might
be that you have a problem with your microphone. And at that point, it's worth going into this
check the microphone link and going through this little wizard to try and work out any of the
issues that you're having with your microphone. But nine times out of 10 I will say that Cortana
works straight off the bat straight after your install of Windows as it's just utilizing the
microphone that's built into your device.
Now for the purpose of this demonstration, I'm actually going to turn on this option here for Hey
Cortana and then I'll turn it off and show you how it works the other way. So, let's turn that on.
I'm going to click Close. And if I want to bring up or invoke Cortana all I need to say is; “Hey
Cortana. What's the weather like in London today? The forecast in London, England shows
partly sunny skies with a high of 27 and a low of 15 degrees. Right now it is sunny and 26”. So,
very quickly, she's pulled up that weather forecast for London for me. Now if I close that down
just by clicking on the cross. And I'm actually going to jump back into those Cortana settings for
one moment. And I'm going to turn off that, Hey Cortana option, and close it down.
So, now if I say the word Hey Cortana, she's not going to pop up. In order to invoke Cortana, I
would need to click on the Cortana button that's to the right of my Search box. And I've utilized
Cortana for things like setting alarm. So let's see how we would do that. So I'm going to click on
Cortana. Set alarm for 2:59pm. And there we go, you can see immediately that's popped up with
the alarm.
I can also use Cortana to search for things on the web. So let's invoke Cortana, again, “Who won
the X Factor in 2012”? And there we go, she's pulled back that result for me. And Cortana is
pretty unrestricted in what it can look for. It can search the web, it can search for things on your
PC, and provide you with lots of really useful information. She can also do things like play
songs. Now, Windows 10 has its own song library, and it's called Groove Music. Now, I'm going
to click in the Search bar here and search for Groove Music. And this is some way you can store
all of your mp4 files, your music files.
Now I don't actually have mine stored in Groove Music, I have my music library elsewhere. But
if you had mp4s and songs listed in here, you could also utilize Cortana in order to play those
songs from your music library. So lots of really good uses for Cortana there. Just make sure that
you check your settings, make sure she recognizes your voice, and your microphone is picking
up your voice. Speak clearly, and simply, and you should find no problems. That's it for this
module. In the next module, we're going to do exercise two. So, please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 02

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We're now down to
exercise two where we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned so far.
So, this is a very straightforward exercise, I really just want you to have a little play around and
practice with Cortana. And I want you to do all of this completely hands free so just using your
voice. So, the first thing I'd like you to do is I want you to use Cortana to find out what the
weather is right now in Melbourne, Australia.
I'd then like you to find the cosine of 60 degrees. And then finally, I'd like you to get Cortana to
open the Notepad application. That's it for this exercise, I will see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Notifications and Action Center

Deborah: Hi everyone, welcome back to our course on Windows 10. In this very quick module,
we're just going to finish off talking about Notifications and the Action Center because there are
still a few important points that we haven't talked about yet. So we're going to start out just by
going through your Notification settings. And then I'm going to show you how you can
customize what you see in your Action Center.
Now, there are numerous different ways to get into your Notification settings. But as we've just
been utilizing the Search bar in previous modules, I'm going to use that. So, I'm going to click
down in my Search bar, and I'm going to type in notifications. And you can see the best match
option there is Notifications and Actions setting, which is exactly what I'm looking for. Now
quick actions at the top, we're going to come back to that a bit later. For now I want to focus on
Notifications.
Now if you're somebody who likes to be notified visually when something happens. So for
example, if an alarm goes off, you might like to have a little pop up banner in the corner of your
screen. Or if you receive a new email, maybe you want to see that as well, this is where you can
customize which apps can send you notifications. Now if you're somebody who doesn't like
notifications at all, you don't like those little pop up banners, then you have a little sidebar option
here to turn off all of your notifications.
Now in general, I keep this on except if I'm doing something like a webinar, or maybe I'm in a
meeting and sharing my desktop, I really don't want other people to see pop ups of emails that
I've got coming in. So, that might be when I would toggle this option off. You also have some
other options underneath with regards to your notification. So, if you want them to be displayed
on the Lock Screen, then put a check in that box. And I don't know if you remember right at the
beginning of the course, when we were looking at that Lock Screen, I actually have this option
turned on. And it was showing me that I had three unread emails. You can also do things like
show reminders and incoming calls on the Lock Screen.
And if you want your notifications to place sounds, then make sure you have a tick in that box.
So, all of these are very much personal preference, but go in, review them, and turn on the ones
that you're interested in. Now you can also specify which applications you receive notifications
from. And I find this particularly useful, because there are some things that I like to be notified
about and other things that I don't. So, I'm not particularly that interested in having a pop up
banner when I receive a new email. So, I can come in here and I can turn that off.
So, that means that if I am in something like a webinar, where I'm sharing my desktop, I can still
see other notifications. But I'm not going to get any of my personal emails coming in and
showing on the screen. Now the rest of these again, these are personal preference. But I'm going
to leave the rest of these on. And what I'm actually going to do just to show you that notification
pop up is I'm quickly going to set an alarm. So, we can utilize our Search again down here. And
I'm going to type in alarm, and it takes me to Alarms and Clock. So you can already see how
useful that Search bar is for quickly finding things on your PC.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now I'm going to set an alarm for about one minute’s time. So what time are we at? 3:22. So,
let's say 3:24pm, which is in about a minute's time. I'm going to click Save at the bottom. And
when that alarm activates in one minute, you will see a notification pop up in the corner of my
screen. And there you go, there is my alarm. So jump in here and customize what you want to
see.
Now the other thing that I want to talk to you about which is in here is if we scroll right back to
the top, I want to talk to you about these Quick actions. And it says here; “You can add, remove,
or rearrange your quick actions directly in the Action Center”. So quick actions relate to the
Action Center. So let's pull up the Action Center again. And we're talking about these little tiles.
So if you remember, the Action Center is a quick way just to turn off or turn on different modes
or settings.
So for example, if I want to switch to Tablet Mode, I have my little quick action button there in
order to do that. Now of course you can customize what you see in here and make it relevant to
what you use. And you would do that by clicking on this link here; “Edit your quick actions”. So
now you can see that I can go in and I can make changes to what I'm seeing in here. So if I want
to move things around or rearrange them, I can pick up and I can drag and reposition. I can also
click on this little pin icon in the corner. And that's going to remove that quick action.
So it's a good idea to go through these and just remove any that you don't think you're going to
use. So I'm going to remove Flight mode as well. Let's remove Project. And yeah, I'm pretty
happy with those. Now if I wanted to re add any of those quick actions, if I click the Add button,
you can see there they still are, I can click them to add them back in. So essentially, you have a
standard set of quick actions that you can add or remove from this area. And once you're happy
with your layout, click on done, and you're all set to go.
That's it for this module on Notifications and Actions. In the next module, we're going to be
taking a look at using Windows and dialog boxes. So please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Using Windows and Dialogs

Deborah: Hello everyone, welcome back to our course on Windows 10. In this module, we're
going to be taking a look at using Windows and Dialogs. Now if you've used an earlier version
of Windows 10, this is one of those sections that you can probably give a miss.
Because what we're going to do is we're going to look at the Ribbon interface. And if you haven't
used Windows before, then this section is very important. So we're going to be looking at the
general use of Windows and Dialogs. And we're going to be using a couple of applications. So
I'm going to start out by running you through the Features of Windows, we're going to move into
Moving and Resizing Windows, we're going to talk about Dialogs, Menus, and finally, the
Ribbon.
So first, let's start out by taking a look at some of the features that are integral to Windows. And
to do that, I'm going to open an application and I'm going to open the Notepad application. So
I'm gonna use my Search box at the bottom, I'm going to type in Notepad, I can see there it is at
the top click to open. Now, Notepad is essentially a very simple little window, which just allows
you to type in any notes that you have very quickly and easily. And you can save these files, and
they save as .txt files. And they can then be used for you to just open and read if you want to. Or
you can import that information into another application such as Excel.
And this is one of the standard applications that will come with Windows. So if you have
Windows, you're going to have the Notepad app. Now if we delve back into the history of
Microsoft, going all the way back to the 80s, we had this concept of Windows right from the
very start, which of course is how it got its name. And Windows give a consistent way of
interacting with your PC.
Now, I will say that with the advent of some of these Universal Apps that we can download from
the Microsoft Store, this consistency has gone because as I mentioned before, within these apps,
they have their own Menu Systems and their own way of working. But you'll find with any of the
Windows native apps, they generally follow the same kind of rules, guidelines, layout, so on and
so forth. So let's take a look at this window.
In the top right-hand corner, we have these three little buttons just here. So if I hover my mouse
over this first one, this one is Minimize. If I click it, it just minimizes that particular application
down into my Taskbar. And you can see there the app is still open, I just need to click in order to
restore that application. The next button along that I have is the Maximize button. So currently,
I'm working in a reasonably small window. If I wanted to make this full screen, if I just click that
button, it's going to make it full screen. You can then see that that icon changes.
So it says to me restore down which is going to put it back to how it was originally. And then the
final button we have there is the Close button. So if I want to close this window, I can just click
that cross and you can see it's gone. It's also no longer displaying as open in my Taskbar.
Now if you are operating within a window, you might find that window may have many panes or
panels. Now this one in particular doesn't, but we will look at some examples of that a bit later

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

on. But what you will find is that all windows have a Title bar. And the Title bar is used for a
few things. First of all, it tells me what I'm working on. So you can see here it currently says;
“untitled”. And then it says notepad which is the application I'm using. If I was to go in and say
File, Save As I can then choose to name this as something else. And you can see there at the
bottom it says “file name”. And I'm just going to click in the front here. And I'm going to name
this “my first file”.
It's telling me it's going to name it as a .txt, which is the default file format for Notepad files. If I
click save, you'll see that that title bar has now changed to My first file.txt. And because I save
that to my desktop, you can now see it's also there on the desktop giving me easy access when I
need to open this.
Now when it comes to moving and resizing windows, that's also very easy. If I want to move this
window around, again, all I need to do is click on that title bar area and drag it around. And you
can see I can pretty much place that wherever I like. Remember that if you go too far over to the
left or to the right, that Snapping feature in Windows comes into play, which when I let go is
going to snap it and I can fill the screen with another application that I have open if I choose to. I
can also resize this window simply by dragging those boundary lines. So if I hover over the
right-hand side, you'll see I get that double headed arrow. I can drag it in, I can do the same on
the bottom, I can drag it up, and I can even drag diagonally.
So when I hover my mouse right over the corner until I get that diagonal, double headed arrow,
that's going to allow me to freely drag that to the size that I want. What you'll also notice is that
most Windows will have some kind of Scroll bar. And you can see that I don't have anything in
this document at the moment that requires me to scroll down. So I have no Scroll bar there,
essentially. But if I was to press Enter a few times, you can see now that Scroll bar becomes
active, and I can scroll up and down my document, and you'll find that it's fairly standard across
all of your Windows applications. So let's move on to talking about Dialogs.
Now, dialogs are a special kind of window. So let me show you an example of a dialog box.
Now I'm going to go up to File here, and I'm going to say Open. And what I have here now is a
dialog box. And what this means is that whilst I'm using or working within this dialog box, I
can't really do anything else in Notepad. If I try and move this dialog box out of the way and try
to type something or even click in this window, it's not going to let me because I have a dialog
box open.
A dialog box allows me to perform a specific action. So in this case, it's allowing me to open any
file that I have saved off. Now I'm just going to navigate this Course Files Folder, and I'm going
to open a Notepad text.txt. You can see this now has opened, I've got the name in the Title bar up
there. And you can see I just have some test text in that file. So I can now carry on typing in this
particular file if I want to. But if I'm finished with this file, if I jump up to File and click Exit,
that's going to close my Notepad file, but it's also going to close the entire application.
Now, if I want to open a file, and I'm going to click File and Open again, it might be that the file
I want to open isn't listed in here. So by default, I'm not essentially being pointed to the correct
folder. And you can see just the bar, you can see which folders I'm in so I'm in the Online

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Courses folder, Windows 10, Course files. And then underneath it show me all the files that are
contained within that folder. So it might be that if this is the incorrect folder, I need to navigate
to the correct folder. So I just do that by scrolling up and selecting the location where that file is
stored. So I'm going to go back to my desktop where I have My first file.txt.
Now another thing I can do from within here, and I'm going to make this window slightly bigger
just by dragging it out, is if I want to see a preview of that file before I open it, so maybe I'm not
sure if this is the correct file, and I need to see the contents, I have this little option just here that
says “Show preview pane”. Now this file doesn't have anything in it whatsoever. So what I'm
going to do is I'm going to double click to open it, and I'm just going to type some text into here.
I'm going to say File and Save. And now if I go back to File and Open, click on my file, you can
now see in the Preview pane, it's displaying the contents of that file. So the Preview pane is a
really useful little feature to turn on.
Now it might be now I've started working in this file that I want to make some changes to this,
but I want to make those changes in a different file. So I can say File, Save As, and what I'm
going to do is I'm going to call this My first file v2 for version two. Click on Save, you can now
see that that title has changed in the Title bar. I can carry on adding information into this file. I
can say File, Save. But essentially if I go to File and Open, I now have two files. So if I open My
first file.txt, you can see there is my original version. And of course, if I wanted just a blank
Notepad file, again, I can go up to the File menu, select New, and it's going to give me a new
file.
And it's worth noting that with Notepad, everything opens within one window. So if I wanted a
new file in a new window, I can say New Window and I get a second window. And of course to
close these down, just click on the cross to close them down.
So I've reopened that second version of my Notepad file just so I can highlight to you some other
options that you have that are very windows specific. So we have our Menu bar running across
the top; File, Edit, Format, View, and Help. And as you've seen, when we click, we get a
dropdown menu with various different options that we can utilize within this window. So we've
seen a few of these at the top here. But we also have things like Page Setup, we can choose to
Print this particular file. And we also have the option to Exit.
Now the Edit menu, I'm not going to go through all of these, but one thing I do want to point out
is that you'll see that some of the options within here are slightly grayed out. Now when you
come across a grayed out menu option, it means it's not accessible, so it's not available for me to
use. And if you're wondering why well, if you look at it this way, if I want to select Copy, I can't
at the moment. And the reason why I can't do that is because I haven't got any text highlighted.
So, Windows doesn't know what I want to copy. And the same thing there would apply to the
Cut option.
So, let me highlight this first line of text just by clicking and dragging. Now if I go to the Edit
menu, you'll see that both Cut and Copy are available for me to select because I now have some
text highlighted. If I select Cut, it's going to remove it, I can then jump down to the bottom of my
document, go to Edit and say Paste to paste that piece of text in. And it's also worth noting that

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

these menu options that you get in your window will very much depend on which app you're in.
And I will say many options have changed so much over the years.
Now if you've been using Microsoft applications for quite a while, you'll probably remember that
about eight or nine years ago, we went through a huge change where all of the dropdown Menu
Systems were replaced with Ribbons. If you've never had a ribbons, don't worry, we're going to
come on to that in a while. But prior to that Ribbon structure across applications like Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, we had menu dropdowns very much like you see here. So you can see here
that some of the Windows applications still retain those menu dropdowns, where some of them
have adopted that Ribbon structure.
And just to give you an idea what I mean when I'm talking about Ribbons, and we are going to
get onto this and cover this in a lot more detail a bit later on. But I've just opened up Excel to
show you an example of the new Ribbon structure. So you can see here that we have our menu
headings running across the top; File, Home, Insert, Draw, so on and so forth. But when I click
on them, I don't get a dropdown menu like I do in Notepad, I get these ribbons that run
horizontally across the screen, which contain lots of different icons with all of the different
commands. And this was a huge change.
I remember I was part of the rollout of this new system across different companies. And it was
very difficult trying to get people to switch from dropdown menus to this Ribbon structure. But
we're eight or nine years down the line now. So hopefully, everybody's kind of got used to it.
And again, if this is the first time that you're seeing these ribbons, we're going to talk about them
more in much more detail a bit later on.
So the main thing I'm really trying to highlight here is to just be aware that you have two options
when working within Windows apps; the Menu System dropdowns and also the Ribbons. That's
it for this module. In the next module, we're going to be talking more about the Start Menu. So,
please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: The Start Menu

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be delving a little bit more into the Start Menu. Now, we've already looked at
many different aspects of the Start Menu, but we're going to start to get more into some of the
personalization features that you have.
So we're going to start out with an Overview of the Start Menu. And I'm going to show you how
you can Navigate the Start Menu. And then we're going to look briefly at the Start Menu in
Tablet Mode.
Now, if you're used to using Windows 8, or 8.1, then this Start Menu is going to look a little bit
unfamiliar to you. Microsoft changed the way that you access your programs in Windows 10.
And it now has this kind of hybrid system where we have menu items and also a tile based
system. And as I mentioned before, this is kind of a compromise in Windows 8 and 8.1. It was
all tiles and no Menu System. People didn't like that so much. So now in Windows 10, we have
kind of a compromise a hybrid between the two.
And as I've mentioned before the left-hand part is the traditional Start Menu, like in Windows 7.
And the one on the right is the tile based system. And both of these are very customizable. So we
can make the Start Menu bigger by dragging it up or dragging it down, we can drag it out to the
left or back in again depending on how we want that to look. And what you'll see here with these
tiles is that I currently don't have mine organized particularly well, I've got kind of a big gap in
here. And they're just not organized in any logical order.
Now I can completely customize how these tiles are placed, how they look. I can change the
grouping names at the top. So where we have Life at a Glance and Explore, I can add my own
ones. I can add whatever tiles I find most useful to this section. And I can also rearrange the tiles.
Now if I'm someone who particularly likes this tile based system, you can essentially change
your Windows 10 back to how it used to look in something like Windows 8.
So if I right-click my mouse on the desktop and go down to Personalize, I'm going to select Start
from this menu. And I can switch on this option, “use start full screen”. If I click to turn that on,
and close this down, now if I bring up my Start Menu, you can see I have the full screen and it's
just those tiles. Now if I want to get back to just my desktop, if I click the Windows logo again,
that's going to give me back my desktop. Now I'm going to right-click and jump back down into
Personalize. I'm going to go to Start and I don't particularly like that option. So I'm going to turn
it back off.
Now you can see here there are lots of ways that I can personalize my Start Menu. So for
example, you could jump into Colors just here, and you could change the colors that you use on
that Start Menu. So if I click on this dropdown, I have a choice between dark or light. So if I
click on dark, you can see that that makes quite a dramatic change. Now I also have a light
option in there as well. You can have transparency effects turned on or off so I have mine on. So

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

if you look down on my Taskbar, currently it's slightly transparent. Now I could turn that off and
make that more of a solid fill.
I can choose my accent color. So again, if I switch this to dark, this is going to show up a little
bit more. But my accent color is the color of things like these lines which are appearing
underneath my open applications. So currently, I have that set to this sea foam color. But you'll
see if I select red, then that's gonna change the color of those little accents. So again, entirely up
to you which colors you use.
So it's definitely worth jumping into Settings and just taking a look at some of the options that
you have to customize or personalize that Start Menu. And also take a look at some of the colors
that you have when it comes to changing your accent color and background color. Now, as I said
we are going to go more into this when we cover Personalization in a later module. Now when it
comes to the Start Menu and navigating around the Start Menu, we have that menu on the left.
And as we've seen before, if we click on any of these letter dividers, it's going to take us into that
key part. And I'm just going to click on M.
And what you'll see is that I have this little scroll bar, which kind of doesn't appear until I hover
over it, but that's going to allow me to scroll up and down through my menu items. Obviously if
you're using a touch device then you would use your finger to scroll up and down, as opposed to
using the mouse. Now, as we're talking about a touch device, I just want to take a little look at
the Start Menu in Tablet Mode. So I'm going to go to my Action Center, and I'm going to turn on
Tablet Mode. And this is what Tablet Mode looks like. So I'm now going to use my finger as
opposed to my mouse to navigate through some of these options.
Now, if I was to click these three lines in the top left-hand corner, you can see that I can switch
between any tiles that I've got pinned, or I can go to All Apps, which is going to give me that list
of my apps. And to scroll, I just use my finger and drag up, I can click on any of these folders
with my finger. And I can open my applications such as Notepad, again, in a very simple way.
And I can close it back down again. And it takes me back to that centralized Start Menu. And
one thing you'll notice in Tablet View is that it does make everything slightly bigger to
accommodate for your finger because your finger is a lot larger than the pointer of a mouse.
So if we just take a look at a little bit of tile management in Tablet Mode, if I press and hold on
this first tile here, the Office tile, you can see I get a couple of little options. The bottom one, the
three dots allows me to access more options for this particular tile. So again, it really depends
what I want to do. But you'll see I also get the option just above of tapping on that little drawing
pin icon.
Now currently, this application is pinned to my Start Menu, which is why I can see it here. So if I
tap this, it's going to unpin it and essentially remove it. So now when I'm in my pinned tiles, I
can't see it. Now if I want to re-pin that, I can click on my three lines in the top left-hand corner,
I can go to All Apps, I'm going to use my finger to scroll through. I'm going to find that Office
app. And again, if I press and hold, I get my option to Pin to Start. Now if I go back to my
pinned tiles, you can see that my office icon has now been added. And if I want to move that
back to its original location, I just press and hold. And then, I can just simply drag with my

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

finger and drop. Tap anywhere else to deactivate those options. So very, very simple to work in
Tablet Mode.
Now one other thing you might want to do in here is turn off Live Tiles. So we mentioned Live
Tiles earlier. And the Live Tiles are the ones that you can see that are kind of moving, they're
showing updates. So for example, my News app in that middle Explorer group is kind of
scrolling different news items. And you'll see that my Weather app next to it also scrolls and
changes occasionally. And this is what we call Live Tiles. Now if I didn't want that, what I can
do is tap and hold on the Weather app, tap on More Options, go to More, and say “turn live tile
off”. And you can see now it's just showing that, it's not showing me constant updates of the
weather.
So that's a very quick run through of some more options that you have related to the Start Menu
when working in Desktop or in Tablet Mode. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next
one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 4 – Using Settings and Control Panel

Video: Using Settings and Control Panel

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this very quick
module, I just want to show you the difference between User Settings and Control Panel. Now
both of these are mechanisms to adjust your Settings.
So I'm going to start out just by talking to you about the differences between Settings versus
Control Panel, I'll show you a little bit how you can navigate around the Control Panel and then
we'll take a look at User Settings.
Now traditionally, and in earlier versions of Windows, the Control Panel was where you went for
most of your settings on your device. So for example, if you wanted to add a printer or set up
your Wi-Fi network, it’s Control Panel that you would go to. However, in recent versions, and
particularly in Windows 10, a lot of those things that were available in Control Panel have now
been moved across to Settings.
Now this is a little bit confusing, because there are some things that are within Settings and some
things that are still in Control Panel. And for many items, there's an overlap. So you'll find them
both in Control Panel and in Settings. So all I really want to do in this module is make you aware
that you have both of them and how you can access them. So let's start out with Control Panel.
Now, as I said, if you're not good at remembering where things are and where to click, typing in
the Search box is always a good option. And this tends to be where I go when I'm looking for
something on my PC. So I'm going to click down here in the Search box, and I'm going to type in
Control Panel. Best match at the top there, Control Panel App, click to open. And this is my
Control Panel. So you can see here it says; “Adjust your computer settings”, then we have
numerous different groups with various different clickable links underneath.
So if I want to review my Computer Status, I can jump into here and take a look at the Security
and the Maintenance information. If I click back to go back, I can look at my Network Status so I
can see what Wi-Fi I'm connected to. And I can come in here to set up a new connection or
network if I need to. I can jump into Hardware and Sound. If I want to do something like view
the connected devices or add a printer. I can uninstall an application from here or program. I can
change Account type. I can do things like Access or make changes to the appearance of my
Desktop and Personalization.
I can change the Clock so I can change the Date, the Time, or Number Formats. And I can also
adjust some Ease of Access settings as well. Now in older versions of Windows, there used to be
so much more in this Control Panel. But as I said, a lot of it has now been moved across to
Settings in Windows 10. So let's just compare both of them. I'm going to jump back down to
Search at the bottom, and I'm going to type in Settings. I'm going to click to open.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now I want to be able to see both of these. So what I'm going to do is use that Snapping in
Windows 10 and just drag Settings over to the right, and then fill the rest of the screen with the
Control Panel. So now we have this Window Setting screen. And you'll probably see
immediately that there is quite a lot of overlap. For example, we have Personalization in settings.
And we also have Appearance and Personalization in Control Panel. We have Devices in
Windows settings, and we have our Hardware and Sound section over here.
So just to show you how different it actually is, if I wanted to add a printer, if I click on View
Devices and Printers and then add a printer, it's gonna take me to this kind of old style dialog
box. Now in Windows 10, if I want to add a printer, if I click on Devices, you can see I get this
Menu System running down the left-hand side. One of them is Printers and Scanners, and I click
on the plus to add a printer or a scanner. So you can see how different Settings look to Control
Panel. Settings is a lot more modern in its look and feel.
Now when it comes to working in Control Panel, you do have some control over the way that
these icons look. So for example, if I click this little More options dropdown, I can choose the
size of the icons that are being displayed. Whereas in Settings, I don't have any such options. But
personally, my preference is to use Settings wherever possible just because I find it a little bit
more user friendly, a little bit simpler, and easier to understand.
So the point I'm trying to make here is if you're looking for a particular setting on your PC, and
you come into Settings and you can't find it, it's definitely worth jumping into Control Panel and
seeing if it's in there. Because as I said, there are some things still that are only available in
Control Panel and not in Settings.
Hopefully that helps you understand the difference between the two. In the next module we're
going to explore this idea of Settings even more and I'm going to show you how you can make
some basic changes. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Basic Settings

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to explore some of the basic Settings that you need to be aware of. And there are a
few that you should probably be checking right away.
So I'm going to start out by talking you through some of the Settings that you have for Date and
Time, we're going to look at your Language Settings, Region Settings, Mouse settings, and
finally your Pen and Touch Settings. So let's kick this off by taking a look at Date and Time.
Now I'm going to jump straight back into my Settings. So as we saw in the previous module, if
we click in our Search box and type in Settings, we can select to open that up and I'm going to
make that full screen so it's easier to see. And from here, I'm going to jump straight into this
middle option, Time and Language. Now in here, the top option there; “Set the time
automatically”. You can decide if you want to set the Time automatically or not. So if you don't,
you can turn that toggle off.
Now the way that your system knows which Time to set it to is that it accesses a Time server. So
in order for it to be able to do that accurately, you need to make sure you are connected to the
internet if you want to use that option. Now by default, the Time is set automatically, but you can
also elect to have your Time zone set automatically as well. So if I toggle this on, you can see
underneath it's picked up my Time zone of UTC +00:00, which is the correct Time zone for
Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, and London where I'm located. Now you don't have to have the
system set these automatically for you. So if I turn off Time zone, and also turn off set the Time
automatically, it gives me this option where I can set the Date and Time manually. So if I click
on Change, I can now go in and make my manual changes to that if I want to.
Now I'm very happy with my system setting my time automatically for me, so I'm going to
toggle that switch on. Now another useful option that you have in here is the ability to add clocks
for different time zones. So if you look in the top right-hand corner underneath this related
Settings area, you'll see we have a link there; “add clocks for different time zones”. So I can
select to show this clock which is my current location and I can enter display name. So I might
want to change that to London, which is where I'm located. I can also choose to show another
clock and select a different time zone.
So I might have lots of clients located on the east coast of the US. So I might want to have
another clock set to Eastern Time, US and Canada. And I'm going to say US for that one, and
click on Apply and Ok. So now when I click on my Time and Date in the bottom right-hand
corner down on that Taskbar, you can see as I hover over, it's telling me what the local time is
what the time is in London, and what the time is on the US East Coast. And if I click on that, you
can see at the top there, I have London and I also have the US. So, that can be really useful if you
work across different time zones.
Now if I scroll down, you can see at the bottom here, we also have the option to; “adjust for
daylight saving time automatically”. Now in the UK, we observe daylight saving, so I like to

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

have that option turned on. But obviously you can adjust that if you don't observe daylight
saving, then you will turn that to off.
Now if we move down to the next option, which is Region, just come in here and make sure that
you have the correct Region selected, and also Regional Format. So how do you want Dates
displayed? So a good example is that in the UK, we write the short format of the Date in a
different way to the US. So in the US, the month is first, followed by the day, and then the year,
whereas in the UK, it's the day, then the month, then the year. Now you'll notice that I have mine
set to English, United States. And again, if you look down in my Taskbar at the format of my
Date, you can see that that is US format. So, we have month first, then day, then year.
Now I have mine set to that because a lot of the work I do is for you US clients so I would rather
myself be slightly confused then all of my customers. But, I would just come in here and make
sure that you set your Region so that gives you the correct Date format based on where you're
located.
Now, let's jump down into Language. And this is where you can specify what Language is used
for your display. So again, I'm in the UK, so I have mine set to English United Kingdom. But if I
wanted to change my display language, I would need to click on this link; “add a Windows
display language in the Microsoft Store”. And you can see if I click that link, it takes me through
to the Microsoft Store where I can choose to install what they call a Local Experience Pack. So it
says; “get windows to speak your language by installing a Local Experience Pack”. And you can
go through and you can select your Language Pack essentially, so that Windows displays in your
chosen language.
And then right at the bottom there, we have Preferred Languages. And you can see I have two set
here; English, United States and English, United Kingdom. Again, I tend to switch between the
two depending on who the client is that I'm working with at the time, and most of my clients are
based either in the UK or in the US. Now you may not want to have to, you may just be using
your laptop at home. And if you speak English, or French or German or whatever language you
speak, you'll want that to be your default language. So make sure that you click; “Add a
preferred language”, go through, and add that in if your system hasn't picked it up already.
And then finally at the bottom, we have Speech. And here it says; “Choose the primary language
you speak, manage voices for your device and apps, and set up your microphone”. So I'm
recording on a microphone right now. I am speaking English, so I want to make sure that my
setting in there is set correctly. And if I'm someone who uses Speech Recognition, I want to
make sure that my microphone is set up correctly. And I can do that from here simply by
clicking on that “Get started” button.
Now if you're somebody who possibly has accessibility issues, so maybe you don't see so well,
you can choose to get Windows to speak back to you essentially, to kind of talk you through
what you're doing. And you can come in here and you can choose a voice. So we have Microsoft,
George, David, Susan, so on and so forth. So you can come in here, you can choose a voice that
you want Windows to use, you can choose the voice speed, and then you can preview the voice

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

as well. So this area is definitely an area of Settings that I've come into, to make sure that
everything is set up correctly.
Now a couple of other things that I want to highlight within Windows Settings that I recommend
you check before you really get going with Windows is your Mouse settings. So I'm going to
jump into Devices. And you'll see in the menu on the left-hand side, we have an option for
Mouse. There's only a few options in here and they are fairly basic. So if you do use a Mouse,
you want to make sure that you select your primary button. Now I'm right-handed, so my
primary button is my left click. But if you are left-handed, you might want to switch that round if
you have a left-handed Mouse. You can also adjust the speed in which your Mouse wheel is used
to scroll. So if you do have a Mouse that has a wheel on it, you can use that wheel to scroll up
and down pages.
And this is where you can specify exactly how far that will jump as you scroll. So you can
choose multiple lines at a time or one screen at a time. And you can get even more granular with
that and choose how many lines to scroll each time just by adjusting this slider. Now you do
have a few other Mouse settings that you can customize. But to access them, you'll need to jump
across to this “Related settings area”. And you'll see here you have two options; “Adjust Mouse
and cursor size, and additional Mouse options”. Now what you'll notice is if we jump into
Additional Mouse options, it actually takes you through to Control Panel. And this is what I
mean by there is such a crossover, some things are available within Settings and other things not.
So once we have a few of the basic Mouse settings available within Settings, if we want to do
anything a little bit more advanced, it's going to take us through to the Control Panel. So in here,
and I'm not going to go through all of these options, but you can really kind of set up how your
Mouse configuration is and how it works for you. You can even do things like specify the type of
pointers that you're using. So you'll see as I hover my Mouse over the screen, I just have this
little arrow as my Mouse pointer, but I can come in and I can customize some of these if I want
to.
I also have a Pointer Options section in there with lots of different settings I might want to look
at. I can customize how my wheel operates, which is similar to what we have just here. And then
I have some Hardware options as well. So the main point here is that if you're looking for
additional options, always look over this Related settings area within Settings. So our Additional
Mouse options went through to Control Panel. But if I click on Adjust Mouse and cursor size,
you'll see that that stays within Settings. But these options are located in the Ease of Access area.
So it's jumped me straight to those. So if you do have vision problems or any accessibility issues,
you can come in here and do things like change the size of the pointer, and also make the cursor
easier to see when typing. So again, really important for you to come in here and check those
settings.
Now the final couple of things I'm going to bring to your attention in here is if we jump to
Touchpad, again, this is if you're using a laptop that has a touchpad, you can set how Windows
responds when you're using that Touchpad. For example, you can use the Touchpad and you can
double tap it to open files and things like that. And you can make some adjustments to how that

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

responds from this little Tap section down there. You can also customize how you want to scroll
and zoom. So if you want to drag two fingers in order to scroll. So if I do this on my Touchpad,
you can see I'm just using two fingers to scroll up and down on that Touchpad, I'm not using my
Mouse.
And a bit further down, you can really kind of start to customize the gestures that you're using on
your Touchpad. And again, this is all very much personal preference. I tend to not use my
Touchpad as much, I mostly have a Mouse connected. But there are some instances where I do
use the Touchpad predominantly. And if that applies to you, then you're going to want to come in
here and check those settings.
Now finally, if you're using a tablet device and you have a pen, then you're probably going to
want to jump into Pen and Windows Ink Settings. And here you can say which hand you prefer
to write with. So for me, that is my right-hand. And in here, you have lots of different options
that you can customize for how that Pen is going to work when you're using it with your tablet
device.
So again, if this applies to you, definitely come in here, go through those settings and check to
make sure they're set up as you like. So that's it for this module. All I really wanted to highlight
there are some of those basic Settings in Windows 10 that is really important that you go into
before you really start using Windows 10. They are the basics that you need to make sure to set
up correctly so you can work efficiently. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Display Settings

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to delve a bit more into Display Settings. Now most aspects of Display Settings are
handled automatically by Windows 10. But sometimes you may need to change some things.
So we're going to take a look at your Display Settings, we're going to discuss Screen
Resolutions. I'm going to show you how you can Manage Multiple Displays, and I'm going to
show you how you can Make some Texts Larger. So let's start out by taking a look at our
Display Settings.
Now the easiest way to get to your Display Settings is to right-click on your desktop. And right
at the bottom there, you have an option for Display Settings. So starting at the top, this is where
we can come to adjust the Brightness and the Color of our display. So if you find the display is
either a little bit too bright for your eyes, or possibly a little bit too dark, you can just move this
slider up and down to make it brighter or darker. You'll also notice that you have a Nightlight
option underneath.
Now if I turn this on, what you'll see is it says that; “This nightlight is off until 8:59pm”. So
that's basically the time that it's going to get a bit darker outside. And if I have this nightlight
setting turned on, it makes my display slightly warmer. So it's not so harsh on my eyes when it's
dark outside and I'm looking at a bright screen. So again, definitely play around with that setting
and see if that's something that you like. Now moving down these settings, you can see here that
we have a Scale and Layout section. So this is where you can change the size of texts, apps, and
other items.
Now in general, when it comes to the scale just here, mine is set to 125%. And you can see in
brackets it says; “recommended”. Now I always tend to go with the recommended setting in
here, but just to show you what it looks like. If I was to click this dropdown and change the scale
to 100% you'll see that everything gets slightly smaller. So all of my icons on my Taskbar are
now smaller, and so is the text. And I actually find that a little bit too small for my eyes, so I like
to keep it on the recommended setting of 125%.
Again, when it comes to Display Resolution, I always go for the recommended setting for my
device. So my recommended is 1920 x 1080. But you do have lots and lots of other options in
there. So again, it really does depend on the device that you're using. And I can also choose the
Orientation of my display. Now, I like to have mine on landscape. If I flip it to portrait, you can
see that switches my entire screen around. Now obviously, that's not great for me at the moment.
So I'm going to revert back.
Now I have seen some situations where people have desktop PCs, where they can actually turn
their monitor so it's in a portrait position. So if you work in that way, then changing the display
orientation might be what you need to do in here.
And then finally, at the bottom, we have a section for Multiple Displays. Now I'm using a laptop
here, I have one display; one screen that I'm looking at. However, I have in the past, and I know

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Windows 10 for Beginners

many people work with two monitors. So if I wanted to, I could plug a second monitor into my
laptop and have two displays. Now you can see that when I click Detect here, it tells me that it
didn't detect another display because I don't currently have a second monitor plugged in.
However, if I did, I'd be able to see both of those monitors listed under here. And I can choose
how I want to display across those monitors.
So for example, if I want what I'm seeing here extended across both, I can do that. If I want to
duplicate across the monitors. So if I want what I'm seeing on this screen now to be exactly
duplicated on the second monitor, I can do that as well. Now if we look over on the right-hand
side you can see we have a few other little links just here. So this Sleep better area, this refers to
this Nightlight setting. And you can see it says; “Nightlight can help you get to sleep by
displaying warmer colors at night”. And one thing we didn't jump into was these Nightlight
settings. So, my Nightlight is set automatically to come on when it gets dark outside.
But if I wanted to, I could turn that Nightlight on now by clicking this turn on now button. And
what you'll see is that the screen gets slightly warmer in color, which means if you sleep in the
same room as your laptop and you have your laptop open, it's a bit of a less harsh light and also it
is a lot easier on your eyes when the conditions outside are dark. Now underneath here, you'll see
you have different links, which are going to take you to a web browser, which will just give you
a little bit more information about setting up multiple monitors. Also how you can adjust the font
size, change your screen brightness, and fix any screen flickering as well.
Now when it comes to the size of the text that you're seeing on your display, you can make some
adjustments to some of the text in Windows 10. And it's worth noting that this applies to Desktop
Applications, and not any of the Universal Apps that you may have downloaded. So in order to
demo this, I've opened up Notepad again. And I just want you to look at that title bar and just
make a note of the size.
Now if I want to change the size of the text, the easiest thing for me to do is jump down to my
Search bar at the bottom. And I'm going to say; “make text bigger”. And you can see at the top
there, it's telling me make text size bigger is in System settings. And it's actually in the Ease of
Access area.
Now I'm going to minimize this window down a little bit so we can still see our Notepad
underneath. And what I can do is I can drag this little slider in order to make the text size bigger.
I'm going to click on Apply. And you can see now that that title bar in Notepad is a lot bigger. If
I adjust it again, just to make it very dramatic and click on Apply, you can see how much bigger
it's making that text. And it also is making the text underneath my desktop icons bigger and
easier to see as well. But you'll notice that it doesn't make any of the Taskbar icons or anything
in that Taskbar bigger, just Desktop items and just these Window Menu Systems.
Now for me that's a little bit too large. So I'm going to take that all the way back down, click on
Apply and everything's now set back to normal. So again, a number of different options in there
related to setting up your display so that it suits you and the way you work. Definitely jump in
there and go through those and change those settings accordingly. That's it for this module, I will
see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Power Options

Deborah: Hi guys, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We're down in Section
four. And in this module, we're going to take a look at our Power Options and Power Saving
Settings. So it's really important if you're using a battery powered device like a laptop, it's really
essential that you understand that you can extend the life of a laptop battery by using its power
carefully. And an example of that would be switching off or reducing the brightness of your
display.
So in this module, I'm going to go through with you the options you have for Power Saving,
we're going to talk a bit about Power Buttons, I'm going to show you Power Plans, and also how
you can access your Advanced Power Settings. So let's start out with our options for Power
Saving. Now, as I said, screen brightness will greatly affect the use of power. Even if your laptop
is plugged in, it's still going to use electricity. So one way to reduce power is to adjust the
brightness of your screen.
Now I'm going to jump down to Search and I'm going to type in the word Power. And you can
see here, it's brought up best match PowerPoint, which is probably the most obvious thing. It's an
application I use all the time. But I don't want that. If I go down a little bit to Settings, this is
what I'm looking for, Power and Sleep settings. And I'm going to maximize that window. Now
it's worth noting that we're going to get on to talking about something called a Power Plan. You
can essentially set up a Power Plan and personalize or customize the options for each power
setting.
Now any changes we make in this screen just here aren't related to any kind of Power Plan.
These are separate from that. But if you don't have a Power Plan set up on your laptop or your
PC, and you just want to make some minor changes you can come into here. So you can see here
Power and Sleep. The first thing we're discussing is screen. So it says; “On battery power. So
when my laptop isn't plugged in, essentially, turn the laptop off after…” and then you can select
how many minutes. So currently, I have mine set to four minutes. And then I have the option that
when my laptop is plugged in, it's going to turn itself off after 10 minutes.
So if I leave the room or go to bed, and I forget to turn my laptop off, it's automatically going to
turn itself off after 10 minutes if I have it plugged in. And again, we have similar options for
Sleep. So if you remember, that Sleep option means that your PC doesn't shut down completely.
So if you have all of your applications open, it's not going to close them all down, the PC will
just essentially go to sleep and work in a really low power mode. And all it means is that if you
want to wake up your PC again, you just have to come back to your PC, press the spacebar or
wiggle your Mouse around, log back in, and all of the applications will still be open in the
background.
So here I have my Sleep settings. Again on battery power, PC goes to sleep after four minutes.
When plugged, in after 10 minutes. So come in here and adjust the settings accordingly. And
finally at the bottom, I have an option here Network Connection. So it says; “when my PC is
asleep and on battery power disconnect from the network”. Now I don't like to do that I like to

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Windows 10 for Beginners

have mine always connected to my Wi-Fi, so it's super quick for me to just get up and running
with what I want to do. But again, that's personal preference. If you want to disconnect from the
network when it goes to sleep, then feel free to change that setting.
Now if we look over on the right-hand side, you can see we have a Related Settings option just
here. And we have a link to additional Power settings. So let's jump into here and see what we
have. Now you can see here, this is one of those options, which jumps me to Control Panel. So
my Advanced Power settings are not available in settings in Windows 10, they have to be
accessed through Control Panel. And I have a few different options that I can change in here. So
let's start at the top; “choose what the Power Buttons do”.
So when we say Power Button, we're talking about basically the button you press to turn your PC
or your laptop on or off. Now in here, this is where I can specify what happens when I press my
Power Button. And a good portion of this really depends on the features of your device. And you
can see here there's some settings related to the Power Button and also to the Sleep Button. Now
I have a Power Button but I don't have a Sleep Button. And you can see that I've chosen this
option here that when I press that Power Button, if my laptop is on battery, it goes to Sleep. If it's
plugged in, it goes to Sleep. And also if I was to close the lid on my laptop, it also goes into sleep
mode, whether I'm on battery power or plugged in.
Now it is worth noting that you can change these. So for example, I'm I want to say that when I
close the lid of my laptop, I want it to completely shut down. So I could select that if I wanted to,
or I have the options of hibernate or do nothing. Now an option in here that we haven't really
talked about too much is Hibernate. And hibernate is important because unlike Sleep, which still
uses some power, this one doesn't, but it doesn't shut down either.
So essentially, what happens is your device stores its current state. And if it's hibernated, it will
start more quickly than from cold. So if you use a laptop, and you want to start it up very
quickly, you might choose to Hibernate rather than Sleep. So I'm actually going to set this to
Hibernate on both of these for when I close the lid. And I'm going to say Save Changes. Now
let's move down to this option here; “creating a Power Plan”. You can essentially create your
own Power Plans in Windows 10. So I'm going to show you how you can go through and just
create a very simple Power Plan. So you can see here it says; “stop an existing plan and give it a
name”.
Now Power Plans again, are very much based on your device. So some devices allow you to
create a balanced Power Plan, a Power Saver, and a high performance Power Plan. Now my
default Windows 10 is balanced. And you can see here it says; “Balanced, automatically
balanced performance with energy consumption on capable hardware”. So if I wanted to create a
Power Plan, I could choose a name for my plan. So I'm going to call it Deb’s plan. I'm going to
click on Next. So this is basically where I can define my power settings, my options and
implement my own Power Plan.
So here it says; “Turn off display after four minutes on battery and 10 minutes when plugged in.
put the computer to sleep after four minutes and 10 minutes”. Now I'm happy with that. So I'm
going to click on Create. And you can see here, I now have two different Power Plans. So the

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

first one is balanced, which is one of the defaults. Now notice that I don't have any other options
for my Power Plan. As I said, some people have Power Saver, and high performance, they have
three Power Plans available within Windows 10. I only have one. So that's the only one I'm
seeing down here.
I now have the plan that I've just added, it's currently selected. And if I click on Change plan
settings, I can come in here and modify these two if I want to. And I can also change Advanced
Power settings. Now in here, you'll see that it says; “Select the Power Plan you want to
customize, then choose settings that reflect how you want your computer to manage power”. So I
have only two options up here I have balanced, which is one of the default ones. And I have my
plan, which is currently the active plan. And I can come into here and I can make further
customizations to my Power Plan.
So for example, if I expand Power Buttons and lid, I can carry on expanding. And I can change
any of these options just by clicking and selecting something from the dropdown menu. I can
expand display, I can also expand battery. And I can choose what notifications I want to receive
as well. So lots of different options for you to customize. Now I will say you don't have to use
your own Power Plan. A lot of the time, the one that's installed in my case, balance, will be
sufficient. But if you're really conscious about how much power, how much energy you're using,
it is worth maybe thinking about customizing your own Power Plan.
Now the final option I want to show you in here is again in settings. And we're going to jump
down to Battery. And it's worth noting that you can also get to this page very simply by clicking
on the Battery icon in the Taskbar. So as I said, I'm using a laptop, it's currently plugged in, and I
can see that I am fully charged a 100%. But if I click on Battery, and go to Battery settings, it's
going to jump me to the same page. So this is quite useful if you want to see which apps are
affecting your battery life, you have a little link to do that. And I'm going to change this time
period to one week.
What is going to show me is which apps I've been using, which are affecting my battery life
most. And you can see here by far, Google Chrome is the application which is draining my
battery more than anything else that I use. So that can be quite useful information to see. Also, if
you scroll down, you can extend your battery life by limiting background activity and push
notifications when your device is low on battery power. Now I have this setting turned on so it
automatically activates. So it says; “Turn Battery Saver on automatically if my battery falls
below”, and then I've selected 20%. And also I've got it to lower the screen brightness while in
battery saver.
So I basically have my system set up so that it's constantly adjusting settings for me in order to
get the most out of my battery life. So definitely jump into your Power and Sleep settings and
your Battery settings and review those. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Ease of Access

Deborah: Hi guys, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module, we're going
to take a look at the Ease of Access options. And really, Ease of Access just means making your
computer easier to use.
So we're going to start out by taking a look at the Ease of Access Center, I'm going to show you
some options that you do have when it comes to making your computer easier for you to use.
We're going to go through some Helpful Recommendations. And then we're going to take a look
at a couple of examples of Ease of Access settings, we're going to look at the Magnifier, and also
Speech Recognition.
So first of all, let's jump into the Ease of Access Center. Now Ease of Access is one of those
options that's available in both the Control Panel and also Settings. Now within this Ease of
Access options area, you're going to find lots of different things that you can change, which are
really going to help you work in Windows 10, if you have certain accessibility issues. So we're
going to go through some of these, and some of them we've already been through in previous
modules.
So if you remember a couple of modules ago, we were looking at how you can make your text
bigger simply by dragging this slider up or down to increase or decrease the text you see on your
screen. And you can also make everything a bit brighter just by adjusting your brightness
settings. Now let's look at some of the options that we haven't looked at previously. Now if I
jump across into Cursor and Pointer, this is where I can control my pointer size. So the pointer
size by default is reasonably small. So again, if you have any vision issues, you might find it
quite difficult to see where that point is.
So again, you can change your pointer size simply by dragging this slider up or down. And you
can also change your pointer color. And you can also change it to a completely different color if
you want to. So that really stands out. So if you can imagine, if you do have trouble seeing that
small white pointer, you could change it to something like bright pink, you could also change the
pointer size. And that's going to make it a lot easier for you to see.
Now one of the options, which we haven't looked at yet is the Magnifier. And the Magnifier
allows you to zoom in on parts of your display. And you can run the Magnifier in full screen, in a
separate window, or as a lens that follows your Mouse pointer around the screen. So again, this
would be for somebody who maybe has vision problems, who finds it hard to see text items
commands that are on the display. So if I just turn the Magnifier on, you'll see automatically it
zooms in and magnifies what I'm looking at on this Settings page. And I can control that using
this little panel.
So if it's zoomed in too much, I can click the minus to take that back down to 100. Or I can zoom
in again, zoom in again, and make it as big as I like. And what I can also do is if I click the
Views dropdown, currently I have it set to full screen. Now if I was to click on Lens, and I'm
going to actually take this up to 200%. You can see now this little square magnifier will follow

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Windows 10 for Beginners

my Mouse pointer wherever I am. So if I want to see something in particular, so if I want to

zoom in over here, I can just hover the magnifier over this section, and it instantly magnifies that
text but keeps everything else the same size. So that's a really, really nice little option if you do
have issues like that. And of course to come out, you can just click on that cross to close that
magnifier down.
Now there are some shortcut keys for that Magnifier to make it super easy for you to toggle in
and out of that mode. If you press the Windows logo key plus the plus to turn on the Magnifier
and then the Windows logo key plus Escape to turn the Magnifier off. So let's just try that out.
I'm going to hold down the Windows logo key and I'm going to say plus. And there we go. I get
my Magnifier back. Windows logo key and Escape, and it turns it back off again.
Now the next two options in this menu really relate to the Color of items on your screen. So if
you have issues with colorblindness, or maybe you confuse certain colors, then this is probably
where you're going to want to come and check to make sure that everything is set up correctly
for you. So you can see here; “Color filters make photos and colors easier to see by applying a
color filter to your screen”. So if I was to select On to turn on these color filters, you can see that
I have Grayscale selected. And what I could do is say invert it and that's essentially going to
reverse the colors on my screen.
So now I have a black background and white text, which sometimes is a lot easier for people to
see because the contrast is higher. And then right at the bottom, we have some color schemes
that are really there for people who suffer with color blindness. So you can see it says, “Select a
color blindness filter to make the nine colors on the wheel more distinct”. So we have red green,
where the green is weak. We then have red green, where the red is weak, and then blue, yellow.
So lots of options in there for people who have difficulty in seeing colors.
We also have in here a High contrast area. And you can see here it says; “Make text and apps
easier to see by using more distinct colors”. So high contrast colors, in general, are colors that are
very opposite of each other. So that might be bright white text on a black background, or the
opposite of that are white background and black text. So if I turn on high contrast colors, you can
see here it makes all of that text very different from the background. And of course, as always,
you have different themes that you can select depending on which you prefer. And you can go a
little bit further and customize how you want each element in that theme to appear.
So currently, I have text set to yellow. But if I click, I'm going to get my color pane come up, and
maybe I want that to be a bright pink. And then when I click on Apply at the bottom, I can save it
as a new theme, and then utilize that in Windows. Now I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to
click Cancel out of there. And I'm going to turn off high contrast.
Moving down this list we have Narrator. So Narrator is a screen reader. So again, that describes
what's on the screen so you can use the information to navigate on your device. And it can be
controlled by Keyboard, Touch, and Mouse. So again, if you have some kind of vision problem,
then maybe want to turn on Narrator so you can gain a greater understanding of what's actually
on the screen. And you can see just below here you have various different options that you can
customize if Narrator is something that you want to use, including the Narrator Voice.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So you can select the accent, you can select the language, and you have all of these different
sample voices that you can use as your Narrator. And if you want to, you can change the voice
speed. So if it's bit slow, you can speed that up. And you can also change the pitch of the voice
and also the voice volume.
So moving down our list, we're now moving on to options, which are specifically for people who
have trouble hearing. So if we click on Audio, again, we can do things like change our device
volume. Now remember, you don't have to come into settings to change the volume on your
device, you can do that directly from the Taskbar down here. So you see if I click, I'm actually
using a microphone at the moment, and I can adjust my volume. One nice little option down here
is how alerts and notifications are handled if you are hearing impaired. So currently, I have it set
to no visual alert. But if I wanted to, in order to be notified that I have a notification, I can choose
one of these other options.
So I can choose to flash the title bar of the active window, I can flash the whole active window, I
can flash the entire screen. Other options that you have is the ability to turn on closed captioning.
So you can see here it says; “Make your device easier to use without sound by displaying audio
as text”. And you can see there a preview of what your captions are going to look like. And
every element of this caption is customizable. And you can see underneath you can choose the
caption color, the transparency, the style, the size, and even change the caption background.
So if you do have vision or hearing problems, the Ease of Access area is definitely something
you should be coming again to set things up that are going to make your life easy. Now finally at
the bottom, we have some Interaction options. So let's click on Speech. Now most of these
options would be for people who have some kind of limited ability when it comes to reach or
strength. So instead of typing maybe you possibly have something wrong with your wrist or your
fingers. You can choose to talk instead of type using dictation. And you can see here there is a
keyboard shortcut to turn that on. Its Windows logo key plus H to start dictation.
And of course, you can also use Microsoft's inbuilt artificial intelligence Cortana to get things
done. So instead of having to jump onto Google, type your question in, you could utilize Cortana
to do that for you through your voice. You can also choose to dictate text and control your device
using only your voice. And again, that's using Speech Recognition. So maybe you want to open
Word and start typing a document, if you turn on Speech Recognition, you can do that by issuing
voice commands as opposed to clicking with your Mouse.
If we jump down to Keyboard, this is the section which will help you make it easier to type and
also use your keyboard shortcuts. So the first option there is; “Use your device without a
physical keyboard”. So if I turn that on, you can see that I get essentially this little floating
keyboard. And if I’m on a touch device, then I can tap on the screen in order to use this keyboard
or I can use my Mouse. Now one thing that's going to make it easier for you to do keyboard
shortcuts, particularly if you have some kind of issue with your wrists or your fingers, and you
find it quite difficult to press Control, and another key and another key all at the same time, you
can use something called Sticky Keys, which allows you to press one key at a time for keyboard
shortcuts.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So if I was doing a keyboard shortcut of Windows key D to display my desktop, if I've got
Sticky Keys turned on, it just means that I can press the Windows key, and then the D in order to
execute that keyboard shortcut. I don't have to strain myself trying to do them both at the same
time. So Sticky Keys is another really useful little feature.
We also have the option to play a sound when we're using toggle keys. So for example, if we
press Caps lock or Num Lock or Scroll up, we can choose to play a sound to let us know that
we've got that turned on. And then we have some other options here that you might want to
customize. So one of them is the Print Screen shortcut. Now, Print Screen is a key on your
keyboard that you can use to essentially take a screenshot of whatever is on your screen at that
particular time. Now I'm going to turn this setting on because when I press the Print Screen
button, I wanted to open my Screen Snipping utility. And this is a really useful other utility that
we'll talk about in later modules.
And the final two options we have down here are Mouse, so I could choose to control my Mouse
with a keypad. So again, if I have wrist issues that makes it difficult for me to use my Mouse, I
could turn on Mouse Keys to use the numeric keypad to move the Mouse pointer around instead.
And you have various different options related to that underneath.
And finally, we have Eye Control. So Eye Control lets you use eye tracking technology to
control the Mouse, type using an onscreen keyboard, and communicate with people using text to
speech. Now in order for this to work, you need to have an eye tracking device plugged in and
installed on your laptop. But if you do have that, then this is where you can come to customize
those settings. So those are all of the options that you have within Ease of Access. So if you do
have any issues like that, it's definitely worth jumping in here and setting things up to suit you.
Now one final thing I want to show you is we're going to jump into Control Panel because as I
said at the start, there are also Ease of Access options from within Control Panel. So you can see
here, I'm going to click on Ease of Access. And most of these are very similar to the Settings that
we've just gone through. But one thing that you do have in here is a little wizard that will
essentially tell Windows 10, which settings you need turned on for the particular issues that you
have.
So if I was to click; “Let windows suggest settings”, you can see here it's going to take me
through this little wizard and I need to answer five questions. So here it says; “Select all
statements that apply to you; images and text on TV are difficult to see…Lighting conditions
make it difficult to see images on my screen…I am blind…I have another type of vision
impairment”. So you would go through and you would select the conditions that apply to you.
Click Next to take you on to the next question.
So essentially, you can work your way through this wizard. Then at the end of it, Windows is
going to turn on and turn off the settings that you require. And of course if it hasn't got it quite
right, you could jump in there and make any further minor adjustments. But I wanted to show
you that because that does take quite a lot of the stress out of all of those options in Ease of
Access. So that is it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 05 – Personalizing your Windows 10

Video: Personalizing your Windows 10

Deborah: Hi guys, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We've made it all the way
down to Section five, where we're going to move on to talking about Personalizing your
Windows 10.
So this is really the fun part where we get to do things like change our background picture,
change the colors, personalize the Start button and look at themes. So let's start out with
personalizing the Lock Screen. So the first thing I'm going to do here is just remind you of what
my Lock Screen looks like. So I'm going to click on the Windows logo, I'm going to go up to
where my picture is, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to say Lock.
So you can see on my Lock Screen, I have a background picture, I have a couple of links listed
on here. So in the top left-hand corner, I can get to my favorite sites from the taskbar with a
quick click, I have a little “Like what you see link” in the top right-hand corner. So this is
referring to that background picture which has been automatically generated for me by Windows
10. So that isn't a background picture that I've set, it's automatic. And by clicking that link in the
top right-hand corner to say that I like what I see, means that Windows 10 is going to carry on
essentially sending me more photos that are similar for use on my Lock Screen.
You can see in the bottom left-hand corner, I have the time and the current date. And underneath,
it's showing me that I have two new emails ready and waiting. And finally over on the right I can
see that I'm connected to Wi Fi. And I can also see if my battery is charged or not. So that is
what I currently have on my Lock Screen. So let's take a look at the options that we have for
personalizing that Lock Screen.
I'm going to right-click on the desktop, and I'm going to jump down to Personalize. And if we
look over in our menu on the left-hand side, you can see we have Lock Screen. So currently, the
background that I'm using is Windows spotlight. So basically, this is a picture that's generated by
Windows for use on my Lock Screen. However, I have a couple of other options in here. I can go
to Picture, and I can then choose the picture that I want to use on my background. So there are a
few different ones that are available from Microsoft. And these are always quite nice pictures
that you might want to choose.
But alternatively, if you do have your own photo saved off locally, then you can click on
Browse, and you can browse for whichever picture you want to use as your desktop background.
We also have a Slideshow option in here as well. So if we select this option, it means that it's
going to cycle through the default picture folder, and it will essentially make a slideshow. So if
you want to use this option and you want to use your own pictures, you can select which albums
you want to use for your slideshow. So you'll either have to move the pictures that you want to
use into one of these default folders, or you can choose to add a folder. So if you have all of your

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

nice pictures stored off in a different folder, you can choose that folder, and it will use all of the
pictures in there in the slideshow.
And alternatively, if I wanted to just go with one picture, I can browse. And let's go for this one
of the hot air balloons, click Choose picture, and there we go. So a couple of different ways there
as to how you set that picture in the background of your Lock Screen. Now one thing you will
have noticed on my Lock Screen is that it was displaying the date and the time. And you can see
here it says; “choose one up to show detailed status on the Lock Screen”. And I have that set to
my Calendar. Now I'm actually going to change that because I want to see the weather on my
Lock Screen. So I'm going to click and I'm going to choose Weather. And what I'm going to do
is I'm going to have my Calendar, so the Date and Time showing as a quick status.
So currently I have my mail notification showing, I have my Calendar, which is fine, and I also
have my Skype status as well. And if I wanted to, I can click these pluses and I can add other
things to show on that Lock Screen. So maybe I want to add something like the Microsoft Store.
Now it's worth noting with these that they won't show all the time. So for example, even though
I've got Skype selected here as my quick status because I don't have Skype running and I don't
really use Skype to be honest, if there's nothing to show it's not going to show on the Lock
Screen.
Now it's also worth noting that you can have Cortana showing on your Lock Screen as well. And
there's a little link here called Cortana Lock Screen settings. And you can see there is a section
here specifically for Lock Screen. So if you want to be able to use Cortana even when your
device is locked, make sure that you have this turned on. So now we've set those settings, I'm
going to close this down, and I'm going to lock my PC again so you can see the changes that I've
made in action. So I'm going to click on the Start Menu, I'm going to right-click on my name,
and I'm going to say Lock. So now we've taken a look at customizing that Lock Screen, let's take
a look at our desktop background.
So currently, I'm just using one of the standard images that's available in Windows 10. But if I
right-click my mouse and go down to Personalize, this is where I can change that. So again, I
have the options of Picture, Solid color, or Slideshow. Now in this case, I'm going to go for a
Picture. And once again, I have a choice of those standard images available from Microsoft or I
can choose to use one of my own photos. So I'm going to Browse, and this time, I'm going to use
this image just here and click on choose picture. Now I'm going to minimize this window down a
little bit so you can see that picture in the background.
Now currently, where it says Choose a Fit, I've set it to fill the entire space available. But you do
have some other options in here, I could say fit. So essentially, now I have two black lines down
the side of my picture. Now the difference between Fit and Fill is that when I choose Fill, it
essentially zooms into that picture in order to be able to fill the entire space without distorting
that picture. But what I'm seeing here is less of the picture than if I choose one of the other
options. So it's really entirely up to you. If you don't want it to zoom in, if you do Fit, then you're
going to see that whole picture. But you might have some spare space down the side.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now the other options you have are Stretch, which will distort it a little bit and just stretch it out
to fill that available space as opposed to zooming in. you have Tile, which is going to tile that
picture. Now this is a pretty large picture. So the tile doesn't look particularly great because the
picture is so large. But if you were using a smaller image, it would appear in tiles running across
your desktop background. We have Center. So again, that's going to zoom it in and put it right in
the center, which actually looks quite nice on this image. And then finally, we have Span, which
again fits your picture in a slightly different way. So it all depends how you want that to look.
Now I quite liked the Center option so I'm gonna choose that one.
Now if you were using a solid fill as the background color, you can choose from the palette, and
you can choose any of these colors. Now when it comes to personalizing some of the other
elements of your desktop, if we jump down to Start, this is where you can personalize your Start
button. Now mine's kind of set to the defaults. But you can essentially choose which folders are
seen on that Start Menu. So if you remember previously, we came in here and we toggled this
top setting on which made my Start Menu look much more like an older version of Windows
where you only see the tiles as opposed to the tiles and the menu.
I have Show App list in Start Menu turned on so our app list is this list running down here. But
again, if you wanted to, you could toggle that off. And then when you go in, you don't see that
app list. Now I like mine on so let's switch that back on. I can show Recently Added apps. So
again, I quite like this at the top so I can see the last applications that I added. You can show
Most Used apps as well. So let's turn that on. And you can do things like use the Start full screen
if you wanted to. So again, it's always worth jumping into here and customizing these options.
And then right at the bottom, we can choose which folders we want to appear on start.
So when we're looking at this, we're talking about when we click on Start, you can see down here
I have Documents, Pictures, Settings and Power. And this is where I would come to customize
what's displayed on there. So for example, if I was to turn on music, and click the Start button,
you'll now see that Music appears just there. I could turn on File Explorer. And now I have a
quick link to my File Explorer. So nice, quick, and easy way to just customize those icons.
Now the final thing I'm going to talk about in this module is this Themes area. And you can
come in here and you can choose an overall theme for Windows 10. So you can see here that
because I've made some changes, so for example, I've just changed my desktop background
picture to this file just here, I've changed my background color to sage, my sounds are just the
Windows default, and my mouse cursor is Windows arrow. So this is essentially my theme. And
if I wanted to, I could go in and I could save this theme as Deb's Theme, and click on Save. If I
scroll down, you can see that there's lots of other different themes that I could choose. And I
could even jump across into the Microsoft Store and download other themes.
So for example, if we click on Synchronize Theme, you can see here that's going to change my
background to one of the Windows default backgrounds. The color in use is sea foam, so all of
my tiles are going to be by default in that sea foam color. And then my sounds are Windows
default, my mouse cursor is Windows default. And if you wanted to change any of these, you can
just click on the option, go in, and change your color settings.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now I'm not going to delve too much into that they're fairly straightforward. I'm going to leave
you to have a play around set a default theme if you want to. Now the final thing I'm going to do
is I'm just going to change my theme back. So if we go to Personalize, Themes, I'm going to use
my theme and there we go. That's it for this module. I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 03

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We've made it
down to exercise three. And I have a very simple exercise for you just to practice some of the
things that we've learnt in this section.
So you can see here I have the Exercise Files Folder open. So I want you to open the Exercise
Files Folder on your PC wherever you have that stored. And you'll find in there four images and
these are the images that I was using in the previous module. Now what I want you to do is I
want you to choose one of these images as your background image for your Lock Screen.
Alternatively, if you want to practice slideshows, you can utilize all four and set them up as a
slideshow on your Lock Screen.
Alternatively, if you have your own folder, which has your own images and that you want to use,
you can do that instead. What I also want you to do is to make sure that Cortana is enabled when
the Lock Screen is on. Once you've done both of those things, I want you to lock your screen and
I just want you to make sure that your slideshow or your picture is showing, and I want you to
practice invoking Cortana from the Lock Screen to make sure that that's been done correctly.
So fairly straightforward. Just a few things for you to do there which hopefully you won't have
too many problems with. That's it for this exercise. I will see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Managing Tiles and Apps

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We're down to the
last module in this section, section five, where we're going to talk a little bit more about
Managing Tiles and Applications.
Now, we've spoken quite a lot already about this Start Menu area. And I really kind of want to
round this part of the course out just by going through some of the options we haven't looked at
yet, when it comes to organizing and managing your tiles. Because really this little area here is
your central area, is where you go to access your applications, your apps. And you'll see in a
moment that you can even come here to access things like web pages and folders as well.
Now currently looking at this, I haven't customized it at all, it pretty much looks the way it
looked when I installed Windows 10. So I have some default tiles that have been placed in there.
And one thing that you will notice is depending on the device that you're using, you may find
that the manufacturer of that device has placed some of their products or some of their web pages
in the Start Menu for you. For example, I'm using an HP laptop, and you can see here I have a
tile here for HP jumpstarts. That isn't something I installed, it literally came with my copy of
Windows 10 on this HP laptop. So bear in mind, depending on the kind of device that you use,
and where it's been shipped from, you might have slightly different tiles to me.
So the first thing we're going to talk about in this module is Managing your Tiles, I'm then going
to talk to you about Grouping your Tiles, and then finally Managing your Apps. Now we're
going to be working a lot with these tiles, and we're going to start out by looking at how we can
manage them a bit better. Now one thing to be careful of here when you're doing things like this
is that remember, if you click on a tile, it's going to open that application. So just be a little bit
careful as we're working through so you don't keep opening things that you don't need to. Now
I'm going to take this tile here Microsoft Edge, which is essentially Microsoft's internet browser.
You may have used Internet Explorer in the past, this is basically their latest version.
Now if I right-click on that tile, you'll see that I have lots and lots of different options. I could
choose to unpin this from the Start area. Now if I do that, it's going to remove it as a tile. Now I
actually like having that on my Start Menu. So to add that back, all I would need to do would be
to find it in the list here, right-click, and say Pin to Start. What you'll also notice is that if I click
on my desktop background, because I have Microsoft Edge as a shortcut on my desktop, if I
right-click, I also have the Pin to Start option in there. And there it is back again. Now it's been
re-added as the last tile in this list. So I'm going to move this back to its original location by
clicking and dragging it and dropping it. So very simple to move your tiles around.
What you'll also notice is if you right-click on a tile, you'll have Resize options. Now the resize
options that you see in here are different depending on the tile that you're right-clicked on. So
you can see for this particular tile, the only options I have are Medium, which is currently set, or
Small. And you can see that that will reduce the size of that particular tile, I'm going to right-
click again and just resize that back to medium. However, if I click on something like Mail up
here and right-click, if I go to Resize, I have Small, Medium, Wide, and Large. If we select wide,

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Windows 10 for Beginners

you can see it makes a wide tile. Or if I was to go to large, I get a much larger tile, which takes
up quite a lot of space on that Start Menu.
But that can sometimes be quite useful, particularly for something like your mail app, because
it's going to allow you to see the last emails that you got in the live preview there. So as you can
see, this tile is what we call a Live Tile. It's showing me the contents of my email. And as that
refreshes if I get any new emails come through, this tile is going to update. Now if you like Live
Tiles, that's absolutely fine. But if you want to turn that off again, if you right-click and go to
More, you can say Turn live tile off. And instead of actually seeing the contents of my mail
account, I now just see the Mail icon. Now I'm going to make that a medium tile again.
Other things that you have in here. So if I right-click on let's say the Weather app and go to
More, I can choose to pin this to my taskbar. So if I find that I'm always using that Weather app,
if I select pin to taskbar, you can now see it down there in my Taskbar ready to access. Similarly,
if I right-click on it in the taskbar, I can say Unpin to remove that. Now some other options that
you have when you right-click, and again, let's use this Weather app. If I go down to More, I can
jump straight to that app settings. Now this is an app and so the settings I can change are fairly
minimal. But it is just a nice quick way of being able to go in and adjust some of those settings
for that particular app or tile. If we right-click one more time and go to More, you also have a
Rate and Review option.
Now, you'll only see Rate and Review in this menu if you're right-clicked on an app. So that is a
very specific feature that's only for apps. You won't find that on something like Edge, which is a
Microsoft app. If we go to More, you'll see that we don't have Rate or Review. Now I want to
really organize and tidy up my tile. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go through
and I'm just going to remove any tiles for apps that I don't really use all that much. So I don't
really tend to play games during the day, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to say Unpin
from Start. In fact, I'm going to remove this whole Play tile, I'm going to say Unpin folder from
Start.
Now Solitaire, I do play that occasionally. So I'm just going to move that over here. Netflix, I
like to watch on my laptop occasionally so that can stay. I don't tend to go into Tips too much so
I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to say Unpin from Start. Now this is probably an
appropriate time to mention that unpinning from Start is very different to uninstalling.
Uninstalling will remove that particular app that you're clicked on from your PC entirely. So it's
not going to be there. If you want to use it again, you're going to have to re install that back onto
your PC. Whereas unpinning just removes it from your Start Menu. I'm also going to Unpin HP
Jumpstart, and also McAfee. So very quickly, I've streamlined what I'm seeing on my tiles.
Now here you can see a tile that contains lots of my applications. And these are probably the
applications I use most often. Now they're all in one tile, because this is essentially a tile folder.
So if I click on it, it's going to separate out all of those applications. And you can see just above
it now says; “Name a folder”. So I'm going to say Microsoft Productivity Apps and click away.
Now I don't tend to use Skype. So I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to Unpin that from

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Start, but the rest of them I do. I also use Microsoft to do lists, so that can very comfortably go
underneath that group of Productivity Apps.
Now this top group here, Life at a Glance, I actually quite like that title. If I wanted to change
that, I could just click on it, and I could rename that group as something else. But I don't mind
Life at a Glance. So I'm just gonna do some rearranging here, I'm gonna move Weather. And I'm
gonna change this Explore group to say Entertainment. I'm gonna put Netflix up there, I'm also
gonna put Solitaire there. And I'm going to put the Microsoft Store at the bottom just there. And
I'm going to name this group Store, like so. What I might want to do here is because there's just
one tile, I can right-click, say resize, and I'm going to say wide just to move that across.
Now you'll see here, I also have a tile with an up arrow on it. And if I click it, it's going to
minimize all of those Productivity Apps down into that folder. Click again to pull those out. Now
remember, you can add anything from your apps list onto this Start Menu. So I've just recently
installed the Twitter app. So if I right-click and say Pin to Start, it's going to give me my Twitter
app. And I'm going to drag that up to Life at a Glance like so. Now it's also worth remembering
that it's not just apps and desktop programs that you can add to this tiled area of the Start Menu.
You can also add things like folders.
So for example, if I jumped to File Explorer and I want to add this Exercise Files Folder to my
Start Menu as a tile, I can right-click on the Exercise Files Folder and I can say Pin to Start. So
now if we go back, you can see there is my Exercise Files Folder. And I want to drag that down
here and to create another folder group where I say Work Files. I can then go back and maybe do
the same with the Course Files Folder, Pin to Start. I'm going to drag that down here underneath
Work Files as well. So again when I expand that, that is what my tiles are now starting to look
like.
So as you can see, it is reasonably simple to customize the tiles that you're seeing there, create
groups and move your tiles around. So a little exercise for you, which isn't a real exercise, but
definitely something you should have a go with is just customizing that whole area on your PC.
Remove anything that you're not going to utilize frequently, pin applications you use all the time,
and create your own groups to manage and organize those tiles. See how you go with that and I
will see you over in the next section.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 6 – Introduction to File Explorer

Video: Introduction to File Explorer

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to our course on Windows 10. We're now down
into section six. And in this section we're going to be taking a look at the structure of the Storage
on your computer, and also the way it's organized.
So, really what I'm going to do in this module is give you an overview of how things are
organized and the main tools used for accessing what's stored on your computer. So, we're going
to start out with an Overview of File Explorer. We're then going to talk about the File Explorer
Ribbon. I'm going to show you how you can easily Navigate Files and Folders. We're going to
take a look at Folder Views. And finally, I'm going to show you some Folder Options. So, let's
start out this module with a very quick overview of File Explorer.
Now, this might be something that you've been used to using in previous versions of Windows,
and it used to be called Windows Explorer, and then its name was changed to File Explorer a few
years ago. Now there are a few different ways that you can pull up or access File Explorer. For
example, if you look down in my Taskbar, I have my File Explorer pinned down there because
I'm always in and out of this folder.
Alternatively, if you click on the Windows logo key, you may have access to File Explorer from
one of your icons in this left-hand menu. If you remember in one of the previous modules, I
talked you through how you can decide what's displayed in this little menu bar just here. And
one of the ones that I added was File Explorer. Now if you don't have File Explorer in your Start
Menu, and you also don't have it pinned down in your Taskbar, again, we fall back on our trusty
old Search box, and I'm going to type in File Explorer. And you'll see it's the first one in the list.
Now as File Explorer is something that you're going to be utilizing quite a lot, I would suggest
that you do pin this down into your Taskbar to make it super easy for you to access. Now I'm
going to make mine a little bit wider. Now, we have quite a lot of things going on in here. And if
you're not used to using File Explorer, then this might look a little bit chaotic and confusing at
first, but it is fairly straightforward.
Now I have a few things in this left-hand menu. This is essentially my folder structure of my PC.
And if I click on This PC, which used to be called My Computer, in older versions of Windows,
what it shows me are all of my main folders on my PC. And it also shows me my C drive as well.
So, I quite like to come in here if I want to check how much storage space I have left on my C
drive, which is the main location where all of my system files are stored. So, I like to come in
here if I want to ever check how much space I have left on my C drive.
So, when you've had your laptop or your PC for a few years, if it starts to slow down, it's
normally due to the fact that you're running out of storage space. So, this is a good way of being
able to see how much you have left. And at the moment, it looks like I'm pretty good. Now it

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Windows 10 for Beginners

might be that underneath here, depending on the device that you're using, you may have more
items underneath here. For example, I've seen a lot of laptops that have a C drive and a D drive.
They're both located on This PC physically, but they're just two separate drives used for storing
different types of files.
Also, if you have maybe external storage plugged in, you may see that listed down here as well
as something like an E drive. So, don't be too worried if what you see down here is slightly
different to mine. I just have a C drive and I don't have anything plugged in. Now important
things to know here we have our folder structure underneath. And I'm going to select one of
these folders, I'm going to click on Pictures. And you can see that within this folder, I have two
subfolders; Camera Roll and Screenshots, and then I have four pictures.
Now if I was to click this little arrow next where it says Pictures on the left-hand side, you can
see that when that expands, it's going to show me any sub folders that I have underneath there.
So essentially, you can see Camera Roll and Screenshots which are the same two folders that you
can see in the right-hand of that pane. And you won't see individual files listed in the left-hand
side, it's only going to show you any folders or subfolders.
Now you'll see right at the bottom there it says Windows C so this is my C drive. And we have
lots and lots of system generated folders underneath here. This is basically where all of the files
that make my computer run are stored. So I have a lot of important files underneath this
Windows folder. And also things like when I install new applications, those normally fall under
this Program Files folder. So in general, you're probably not going to spend too much time in
these particular folders because they tend to be more related to how your system works.
Now, one thing that's not particularly obvious at the moment is that at the top here, we actually
have a Ribbon structure. But you can't see it because it's minimized at the moment. So you see
where we have File, Home, Share, and View. If I click on Home, you can see that that ribbon
pops down. If I click on a blank space, that ribbon disappears. Now if you prefer to have that
ribbon showing all the time, just click on one of the ribbons such as Home, and then over in the
top right-hand corner, you'll see that you have a little pin icon just there. And if you click the pin,
then that's going to pin those ribbons to the top so that you can always see them.
Now these ribbons that you see at the top are somewhat contextual. So depending on what you're
clicked on, these ribbons might change. So I'm clicked on my Pictures folder, just here. And then
on the Home ribbon, I have all of the commands I can execute. I have some commands on Share.
And I also have a View ribbon up there as well. Now if I was to click on a particular file within
this folder, so I'm just going to click on this first picture just here, you can see now my ribbons
changed, because I'm clicked on a picture.
I now get this additional Manage Ribbon and Picture Tools at the top, which gives me a few
options directly related to the item that I'm clicked on, which in this case is the picture. If I click
away on blank space, that Picture Tools ribbon disappears, because it's no longer needed. So
contextual ribbons, a really important point to get your head around.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now when it comes to navigating around your folder structure on your PC, this Address bar is
really helpful at the top. So it gives you a breadcrumb trail of where you are or where you've
been. So you can see here, it's telling me that I'm clicked on This PC, Pictures, and that is exactly
what I have opened just here. If I want to go back to just This PC, I can click on this breadcrumb
trail to take me back. If I double click on Pictures again, I can see that again in the Address bar.
And I can carry on going. If I double click on Camera Roll, you can see now this breadcrumb
trail is building up.
And one thing you can also do up here is that you can edit. So you can see here I'm in my
Camera Roll in 2002. And then I have one sub folder just called 12. What I could do is click up
here in this Address bar, and I could manually type in /12, hit Enter, and it's going to take me to
that folder which is empty at the moment. If I want to jump back to Pictures, I can just click on
Pictures in that Address bar. So very simple to navigate around.
You also have next to the Address bar, these little browse buttons. So the up arrow, if I was to
click that, that's going to take me up a level to This PC. I can go to recent locations. So when I
click that, I get a little dropdown and I can jump back to Pictures that way. And then I have these
navigation buttons to go back or forward. So if I go back, it's going to take me back to the last
folder that I was in. If I go forward, it's going to take me forward.
And then finally, you also have in this Address bar, this dropdown arrow, which will show you
your recent location. So again, if I wanted to quickly jump back to that 2002 to 12 folder, I can
select from the dropdown and it's gonna take me back to there. Or, I could navigate all the way
back to This PC.
Now one thing that you'll see in this File Explorer window as well is that right to the bottom, we
have a Status bar. And you'll see in the bottom left-hand corner, it’s telling me that I have eight
items in this particular folder. So I'm clicked on This PC, and I do in fact have eight folders. If I
was to click once to select the Pictures folder, you can now see it's telling me I have eight items
and one item is selected. Now I'm going to jump into Pictures. You can see it now says that there
are six items in this folder.
And if I was to select multiple items, so I'm just going to select all four of these pictures. You
can see here it's telling me there are six items, four of them are selected, and it's telling me the
size of those items combined. So 10.7 meg. If I was to hold down Control and deselect one of
them, you can see that that's now updated three items 8.98 meg, okay? So some really useful
information down in that status bar.
Now another useful option that you have in File Explorer is that you can control the way that
you're viewing your files. So if we jump up to the View ribbon, in this Layout group, you can see
that Large Icons is currently selected. So let me show you what happens if I change this to Small
icons, you can see that my view has now changed. I could choose Extra Large Icons, which gives
me something different, I could choose to view my files in a List.
Now the one option that I see people using most often is this Details view. So in here, you can
see the name of the file, and you can drag these columns out and in if you need to. You can see

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Windows 10 for Beginners

its status. Now for me, this is whether this file is synchronized with OneDrive or not. And I'm
going to talk about that a little bit later on. I can see the date the file was created, I can see the
file type. So it's telling me that these top two are file folders. And the rest of my pictures are JPG
files. And I can also see the size.
Now it's also worth noting that these column headings, so the information that you're essentially
seeing in here can be modified. If you right-click, you can see all of the column headings that I
currently have turned on have ticks next to them. So I'm actually going to untick tags, because I
don't use that. And you can see that that's now disappeared. But I could if I wanted to, add in
Date Created, Date Modified, Date Taken, so on and so forth. If I click on More, there's a whole
host of different columns that I can add in if I want to.
Now, I'm going to maximize this window to make it a bit bigger. And I just want to draw your
attention to this first panes group on the View ribbon. So you can see here we have a Preview
pane. So let's turn that on. Keyboard shortcut is Alt + P. And what this does, it pops up a Preview
pane in the right-hand side. And if I select a file such as this one, it's going to show me a preview
of what's in that file. Now that can be quite useful. If you have lots of files that are may be
similar in their name, and you want to see the contents of that file before you open it, that
Preview pane can be really, really useful.
Another thing you have here is the Details pane. So, if we turn that on, you can see here just
gives me more details about this picture. Now, this is actually just a picture that I downloaded
from a website. So, there's not too much information in here. But all of these are editable. So you
can essentially tag your picture and provide it with some metadata. So, that might be something
that you want to do, which will help you do things like search for particular files. And remember,
if you don't like that pane, just click again to toggle that off.
Now the final thing I just want to highlight to you in this introduction to File Explorer is again,
on this View ribbon right at the end, we have an Options dropdown. And you can see here it
says; “change folder and search options”. Now there are loads and loads of different options that
you can customize in here. And most of these are outside the scope of this particular course, but I
will just highlight a couple of them to you.
If we jump across to the View tab, there's a couple of little options in the advanced settings that
I'm going to change. So the first thing I'm going to do is you can see here it says “Show status
bar”. So I'm actually going to take the tick out of that box. And also, I'm going to turn off this
option here; “Use checkboxes to select items”. You may have noticed when I was selecting the
different pictures in my folder, I had a little checkbox in the top corner in order to select. Now,
I'm going to deselect that option. I'm going to click on Ok.
So, what I've done there is I've essentially turned off the Status bar. So now, if you look in the
bottom right-hand corner, it's not telling me how many items I have in this folder no matter how
many files I select. What you'll also notice is if I switch back to Large Icons, you can see that
now when I select a picture, I don't have a checkbox in the corner, I just have that blue border
around the outside to show that I've made my selections.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now, I might not necessarily keep these two options deselected, but just to kind of show you the
sorts of things that you can do in those advanced folder settings. Definitely worth having a delve
into that, and just setting everything up in the way that's going to work best for you. So that's it
for this introduction module to File Explorer. In the next module, we're going to delve a bit
further into some of the elements of File Explorer for managing and organizing your files. So,
please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: More about File Explorer

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to talk a little bit more about File Explorer. And we've looked at many of the aspects
of File Explorer in the previous module. But now, we're going to look at it in some more detail.
So I'm going to start out by talking to you a little bit about User Folders, we're going to take a
look at Libraries. I'm going to show you how you can Create Files and Folders, and also how you
can Copy, Move, and Delete Folders and Files. So, let's kick off with taking a look at User
Folders.
Now I've opened up File Explorer, and in my Navigation Pane on the left, you can see that I'm
clicked on the Windows C drive. And one of the folders that you'll always find underneath your
C drive is the Users Folder. So, if I double click to drill down into that, what you'll see are all the
different users of this PC, and each user has their own folder. So, you can see mine just there,
deb_a but I also have a folder for the two other accounts that I have on this PC, one for Ben Lee
and one for Vicki Matthews.
Now what you'll also see is that there is a Public folder in there, and I'm going to talk to you a
little bit more about exactly what that is a little bit later on in this module. So, let's jump into my
personal folder and see what we have in there. Now this is where my personal User Folders are
stored. And these will include a default set of folders created by Windows 10. So, you can see in
there we have things like Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Music, OneDrive, so on and so
forth. Now some of these folders correspond to particular applications. So, for example, the
Favorites Folder is what holds all of my Internet Explorer favorites.
Now if you're looking at your User Folder on your particular PC, you might find that your list is
slightly different to mine. But fundamentally, you will see those core default folders such as
Documents, Downloads, Favorites, so on and so forth. Now, I'm going to go up a level by
clicking on Users in the Address bar. Now, as I mentioned, I have two other user accounts on
this PC. So, those might be for a couple of other people within my family or within my home
that share this PC. Now if I try to go into one of those User Folders, that isn't my own. So, let's
double click on Ben Lee, I'm getting a message there saying I currently don't have permission to
access this folder.
If I want to, I can click “Continue” to get permanent access to this folder. And it's gonna let me
into that. And the reason why it's let me do that is because I am an admin on this PC. Now again,
I'm going to jump back and level go back to my Users. And let's just go back and talk about this
Public folder. I pointed out earlier, but we didn't really go into too many details. But this Public
folder is there for any items that I want to share amongst all users of this PC. So it's worth
bearing in mind that if Ben is logged into this PC, any documents or anything he creates are
going to be stored in his folder here. And no other user on this PC, aside from those who have
admin access will be able to access anything that he saves into these folders.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

However, there may be times where you want to share Documents, Photos, Files with the other
people who have user accounts on this PC. And that is where this Public folder comes into play.
So essentially, you can save things into any of these default folders that we have here, you can
create your own folders. But essentially anything that is saved into the Public folder will be
available to all users of this PC. So, it's a great way to be able to share documents and pictures.
But it's also worth noting that you don't have to store things in these folders on your PC. And you
can of course create your own folders. But these days, many people prefer to keep their
Documents, their Pictures and other items in other folders such as OneDrive. And you can see
over in my Navigation Pane, I do actually have a link there to my OneDrive. Now I'm not going
to cover OneDrive in this module, we have an entire module dedicated to setting up and using
OneDrive. But the point I'm trying to make here is that you're not just limited to the folders that
you see under your username.
Another important point when it comes to accessing your folders. You'll notice in that
Navigation Pane right at the top, I have this little Quick Access section. So, if we expand that
out, you can see I have a few items in here. Now when you first start using Windows 10, in
particular File Explorer, you will see that you'll probably have a couple of default folders that
have been pinned up there for you. So, more than likely the Desktop, and the Downloads folder.
These other ones below are ones that I've chosen to pin.
So, I've essentially pinned folders that I use all the time to this Quick Access area because it just
makes it easy for me to jump in and out of those folders. And it is a very simple process if I just
scroll down, and let's just say I want to pin this Documents folder. If I right-click, you'll see one
of the options I have is; “Pin to Quick Access”. And that folder is now available up there.
Similarly, if I want to unpin it again, I can right-click and say “Unpin from Quick Access”. So,
my suggestion to you would be to definitely pin all of the folders that you use most frequently
into this Quick Access area.
Now another option that you have within File Explorer in Windows 10 is the option to use
Libraries. And libraries are really a way of grouping folders together. And they're not essentially
folders by themselves. They contain pointers to existing folders. Now, by default, you do get a
set of libraries in Windows 10. But they're not always visible in the Navigation Pane. So, looking
at my Navigation Pane now, I can't see any of those default libraries. But all I need to do to show
those is find a piece of blank space in File Explorer.
So, at the bottom here, right-click your mouse, and select Show Libraries. And now you'll see I
have this little Libraries folder which I can expand. And then again, I have some default folders;
Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. Now, it's worth noting that you're not limited to just
these default folders as Libraries, you can add other folders into your library. So, for example, if
I click on the Pictures library, I can see what I currently have in there. But if I wanted to say go
to my pictures, and I can see there that I have a folder called Trekking in Nepal.
Now if I wanted to add this folder into my Pictures library, all I need to do is right-click, and you
can see I have an option about halfway down that menu, “Include in library”, and then I can just

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

select which library I want to include it into, which in this case is Pictures. And now if I jump
down to Pictures, you can see there is my folder.
Now one of the other things that you can do here is that you can create your own Library. So, if I
just minimize that, if I click on Libraries, right-click, and then go to New, you can see I get the
option to create a new library. So, maybe I want to set up a new library to keep all of my travel
documents and photos in, I can rename it Travel. And there we go. And remember, if I click on
View, if I don't like the way these are displaying in titles, I can display them in a List like so.
And there is my new Travel library.
Now one thing that's worth mentioning is that folders can of course be in more than one library.
And this can be a really convenient way of catalog in folders of content. And one is a shortcut if
you've got a particular folder, and you want to create a new library and start with that folder.
Now let me just go back to the Trekking in Nepal folder again. When I right-clicked that to
include it in a library, you'll see right at the bottom, we have an option to create new library. So,
this will essentially create a new library called Trekking in Nepal. And it will also put a pointer
to the Pictures folder in it. So, that's how you can put your own folders in libraries and also
create new libraries.
But one thing you might need to do from time to time is to take things out of the library. So, if I
wanted to take this Trekking in Nepal folder out of my Pictures library, there's a very quick way
of doing this. If I right-click on my Pictures library and select the Properties option, you can see
here it says; “Library locations”. I've got my pictures library and there is my Trekking in Nepal
folder. All I would need to do to remove it would be to click on that folder and click on the
Remove button. And then click on Ok. And you can see that that's now disappeared. So that's the
use of Libraries. It's time now to take a look at Creating Folders and Files.
Now as I mentioned, you can create as many folders, subfolders as you like in order to organize
your files, pictures, screenshots, and other items. And there's a few different ways as always in
Microsoft that you can create new folders. So, I'm currently clicked on my Pictures folder, and
you can see that I have four subfolders there, and then I have just some files that are sitting
within that folder. Now if I want to create a new subfolder of Pictures, I can right-click my
mouse. And you'll see that I have a new option. And the first item there is Folder.
If select it, you can see I get this new folder and I can overtype what I want to call that folder.
So, I'm going to call this Italy Photos. And there I have my new folder, I double click to go into
that folder. And if I wanted to, I could go through and create a new subfolder. So, very simple to
create folders and sub folders using the right-click options.
Another way that I can do this is I could utilize the Ribbon. So again, if I go up to the Home
ribbon, you can see in this new group in the middle, I have an option for New Folder. And I can
create my folder that way. So, a fairly straightforward process to create folders, but something
that's talked about a lot less is how you can create files from within File Explorer.
Now, most of the time, the way that files are created is that you create them in the app that you're
using. So, it might be that I've got Word open, and I'm writing up my itinerary. Or maybe I'm

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

writing a letter or some kind of document. And then when I go to File, and Save As, I then
choose a folder within File Explorer to save that file into. And that is how we get our files into
our folders. However, you can create them from directly within File Explorer. So I'm going to
double click on Kayaking in Costa Rica to go into that folder. I'm going to right-click, and I'm
going to go down to New. And you can see that I have all of these different file types that I can
create.
So, we have all of the major Office applications there. So, if I want to create a Word document, I
have the ability to do that. I can create Access, Project, PowerPoint presentations, Excel
documents, text documents, loads of different file types in there. So I'm going to say that the
document I want to create is a Word document. And it's going to be the itinerary for my holiday
in Costa Rica. So I'm going to select Word document from this list. And it essentially creates just
a blank file for me. And you can see there, it's highlighted in blue, which is enabling me to
immediately rename this document, I'm going to call my Costa Rica itinerary. And when I click
away, there is my document.
Now when I double click to open this, it's going to open up in Word, but obviously it's going to
be blank. But it at least gives me a starting point. And I haven't had to leave File Explorer in
order to do that. Now, it's also worth noting that when you do right-click and go down to New,
this list is very much going to depend on what you have installed on your PC. So if you don't
have Office applications installed, then you won't see a lot of these options that I have. So just be
aware of that. It's very much determined by the software that you have on your device. So let's
finish up this module by just talking about Copying, Moving, and Deleting files.
So, let's start with the easiest of the lot, and that is deleting. Now I'm going to delete out this
document that I've just created, the Costa Rica itinerary. And again, there's a few ways I can do
this. I need to select my document, and I can press the Delete key on my keyboard to get rid of
that file. I can right-click, and you can see one of the menu items I have there is Delete.
Alternatively, I can go to the Home ribbon, and you can see I have in the middle there a delete
option. And I can choose if I want to send it to the Recycle Bin or permanently delete.
Now the difference between these two we're going to discuss in a later module. So for now, I'm
going to say Recycle to delete that. And that file has gone. So, very simple to delete files. Now
when it comes to moving and copying files, I'm going to jump back to Pictures. Now I have a
folder on my desktop. So, I'm just going to expand Desktop. And this folder is called Camera. So
if I click on this folder, you can see that I have a number of images in there that I took when I
was trekking in Nepal.
Now it might be that I want to move these images from this folder on my desktop to the
Trekking in Nepal folder within Pictures. And when it comes to selecting multiple pictures,
there's a couple of different methods that you can use. So, I could click on the first image here,
hold down Control, click on the second, the third, so on and so forth. Now that's fine if you just
have a few images, but if you have quite a lot, you're probably gonna want to use a quicker
method.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So, another way to go quickly select all of your pictures is to draw a big rectangle around them
all. So, if I click my mouse and click and drag until I get that blue box and let go, that's going to
select everything within the boundaries of that box that I've drawn. So, that's a really nice way of
making selections as well. Another thing you can do is click on the first image, hold down your
Shift key and click on the last image and it will select everything in between. And then the final
option if you really just want to select absolutely everything in this folder, Ctrl + A is also a
shortcut, meaning select all.
Now that I have my pictures selected, I'm going to want to move them to the relevant folder
where I want to store them. So, I'm going to expand Pictures, and I want to move them to this
Trekking in Nepal folder. Now again, a few different ways we could do this. If we go up to our
ribbons, we have a Move to option, where we can go in and we can choose the location that we
want to move them to. But by far the easiest way of moving files to a folder, it's just a drag and
drop.
So, I'm going to grab these files, drag and drop them on that correct folder. And you can see by
default, doing that, the default action is Move not Copy. If I now click on the Trekking in Nepal
folder, there's those images. Now maybe I'd moved them accidentally and what I meant to do
was copy them. So essentially, I still wanted to keep them in the Camera folder on my desktop,
but also make a copy and put it into the Trekking folder. Again, I'm going to select all of my files
Ctrl A, I could utilize my ribbon and say Copy to, and then select a location. I could right-click
and select the Copy option. And the shortcut for copy is Ctrl + C. I can then click on Camera on
the desktop, right-click and paste those files in.
So, a few different ways there of managing and organizing your files. And again, if I decided that
I wanted to actually delete all of these in this folder, I can click on the top one, hold down Shift,
click on the bottom one and this time I'm going to right-click and select Delete from the menu to
get rid of those. I could then go further now this folder is empty, right-click on the folder, and
also delete that out.
So, you've seen a lot more options there when it comes to working with File Explorer. Have a
little practice and a play around with those. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next
one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Searching Files and Folders

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're gonna take a look at how to Search Files and Folders to find content. And there are so
many different options when it comes to search. And we're by no means going to go through all
of them. But it is very important for you to least understand the basics, so you can get some idea
of what's possible.
So, we're going to start out by running through Basic Searching, I'm going to show you your
Search Options. And finally, I'm going to talk to a little bit about File Properties. Now before we
get going with this, I just would like to point out that you can also search using Cortana. Now
this is outside the scope of this course so I'm not going to cover it. But if you do want to do some
further reading on that, then please feel free to do so.
So, let's start out by doing some basic searching. So currently in File Explorer, I'm clicked on
that folder that we created in the previous module, Trekking in Nepal. And you can see in here I
have numerous photos, I don't have a great deal, you might have folders with hundreds and
hundreds of files. I've just got a few in here. But there's enough for me to demonstrate to you
some basic searches. So, the scenario that I'm going to set up here is that from within this folder,
I want to find all of the pictures of mountains.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to utilize the Search box in order to do that. So, just above
the Photos, and to the right of the Address bar, you can see how this little search pane just here.
It currently says; “Search Trekking in Nepal”. If I click in there, I can then type in my search
term that I'm looking for. So I'm going to type in the word “mountain”. And I'm going to hit the
Enter key or I can click on that arrow in order to execute that search. And you can see
straightaway, it's brought back four search results. And all of those filenames contain the word
mountain.
Now when you do run a search, you'll see that you also get access to a Search Tools Contextual
Ribbon. So if you look up at the Ribbons, you can see here; Search Tools. And then we have the
Search tab just there. And this first group is telling me where I'm actually searching. So because
I'm clicked on the Trekking in Nepal folder, it's going to search in that folder, and all subfolders.
I have some other options I can utilize in here. So if I was looking for the keyword “mountain”
across every single folder on my PC, I would select This PC instead.
In the next group along you have some Refine options. So this is really where you can refine
your search results, zero in exactly what it is you're looking for. So I have my search results here.
And it's just given me four pictures. But if I wanted to refine that even more, I could say for
example, I only want to see photos from last week, or maybe last month, I can also refine by
type. Now I only have JPG files in this folder. But if I had different types of files all mixed in
there, I could choose to search by type. I can search by size, so tiny, small, medium, large, so on
and so forth. Then here, we have some other options that you can refine your search results by.
So things like Date Taken, Tags, which we're going to talk more about in a moment, Type,
Name, Folder, Path, and also Rating.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now some of these relate to the metadata in the background of the picture. And as I said, I'm
going to show you an example of that in a moment. In the Options group, you have this Recent
Searches dropdown. So this is showing me the last items that I searched for. So if I wanted to, I
could rerun an old search. So if I select Kathmandu, it’s going to add that keyword in and I can
just then run that search. Now I'm going to go back to Recent Searches and just search for
mountain again, to get those four files back. I then have some Advanced Search options.
So currently, Windows 10 is looking for my search term. So in this case, “mountain” in the File
contents. So the photos that's going to be the name of the photo. But if I also had maybe things
like Word documents in here, which contains a lot of text, it will also search those for that
specific word mountain. And then finally at the bottom, I have the option to Save any of my
searches. And you can see here when I click that button, it defaults to my personal folder on the
C drive, into a folder called Searches. And I can come in here and I can rename this if I want to.
So the file name by default is “mountain search”. And you can see this search file type has
automatically been selected.
So if I wanted to, I can save that search. And then I could come back into here just to rerun that,
again, if I wanted to. Now, that can be quite useful, particularly if you have specified a lot of
refinements to your search, and it's a search that you run fairly frequently. It can be quite nice to
save that search so you don't have to go in and re-select all of those properties.
Now, something that I touched on already is Metadata and Tagging. So I want to show you an
example of what I mean. I'm going to clear this search out. So, I'm going to click on the cross
just to remove mountain. And I'm actually going to rerun that search for pictures with
Kathmandu in the title. Now, this is interesting. So again, I have four files. And you can see three
of them have the word Kathmandu in their name. However, this one here is called Nepal temple.
It doesn't have the word Kathmandu in it. So why is my search returning this photograph in the
search results? Well, that's due to Tagging. So let me show you what I mean.
I'm going to right-click on this picture, and I'm going to go down to Properties. And Properties is
going to show you quite a bit of information about whichever file that you're clicked on. So I can
see the name. And if you wanted to, you could actually rename your file from here. It's telling
me it's a JPG file, it opens by default with the Photos app, and I can see where that file is actually
located. So it's in my Pictures, Trekking in Nepal folder. I can see the size, and I can also see
when this was created, modified and last accessed. So, quite a bit of information about each file
through Properties.
However, the tab that I'm interested in here is this Details tab. Because this is where we have
essentially our metadata for our files, and there's a lot of information that you can add into any
file that you have within File Explorer. Now if I scroll down, you'll see all of the fields. So, if
you've got a lot of pictures, this can seem like quite a Herculean task to go in, and fill in all the
information for every single picture. Now, I will say that if these are your pictures that you've
downloaded from your camera, a lot of this metadata will already be filled in.
So for example, things like the camera make, the camera model, all of that kind of information
will be picked up from your photograph. Now, I don't have a great deal in here because these are

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

pictures I've downloaded for demo purposes from a picture sharing website, which is why a lot
of my fields in here are blank. However, one field that we do have is this Tags field. And you
can see for this picture, the tag is Kathmandu. So that is why when I'm searching for the term,
“Kathmandu”, it's pulling back this file, even though it doesn't have Kathmandu in the title,
because I've tagged it with Kathmandu in the background. So tagging pictures really helps you
when it comes to searching. And if I wanted to, I could come in here and I could add another tag.
So I could add something like golden as is a Golden Temple. And I could carry on adding as
many tags as I liked. So now if I click on Ok, if I was to come back up to my Search up here,
clear out what I have. And if I was to search for golden, you can see that's pulling back just that
file. So again, it doesn't have the word golden in the title. But because I've tagged it with golden,
it's going to find it. And I'm going to clear out that search.
Now once you've finished running your search, you can see I still have my Search Tools ribbon
opened at the top. To come out of this, you just need to click the Close search option. And that
will pull back all of the original files. Now just so you can see an example of some more of those
search refinements, I'm going to jump across to my Camtasia folder. Now, this is where I store
all of my recordings for tutorials like this. And these are a special kind of file related to the
recording software with the file extension being .trec.
Now I do have quite a few files in here, which is why it's quite nice to use this folder to show
you some refinements. So if I click up in the Search box again, I'm going to type in .trec and hit
Enter. And it's just going to pull back all of those files with a .trec file extension. Now because I
do have quite a lot, I might want to refine this search down by again going up to my Search
Tools. And maybe I'm looking for a file that I created last week. So in Date Modified, I'm going
to select Last Week, and now it's pulling back all of those. Still quite a lot there.
Now again, maybe I want to refine this even further down. I'm going to select this Size
dropdown, and I'm going to look for Medium size files in between one and 128 meg, and there
we go. It refines my list down even further. So hopefully that gives you an idea of how you can
utilize the Search options, how you can Refine your search, and also the importance of Tagging
your pictures which is greatly going to increase how easy it is for you to search and find items
and content in your files and folders. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: OneDrive

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this section,
we've been taking a look at Storage and places that you can store your files, which moves me on
quite nicely to talking about OneDrive. And we're going to explore all of the aspects of
OneDrive in this module.
So, up until not long ago, content was stored in your computer on a hard drive, or possibly on
some kind of network drive, or maybe even on a removable storage device or something like a
memory stick or a DVD. But nowadays, people tend to store their documents in the cloud. And
you may have used various different pieces of cloud software. But the cloud storage for
Microsoft is called OneDrive, formerly known as SkyDrive.
Now if you're completely new to cloud storage, and how it all works, then this is definitely a
module that you want to pay attention to. So I'm going to start out by just running through
exactly what is OneDrive. I’m then going to talk to you a little bit about OneDrive and your
Microsoft Account. I'm going to show you how you can access OneDrive using the web and how
you can access OneDrive from your PC. We're then going to talk about a very important part of
OneDrive. And that is, Setup and Synchronization. So let's talk about that first point, what is
OneDrive?
So, if we go back a few years, the way that people generally tended to take backups of the
content on their PC, would be a process of taking a copy of all of the files and folders on your
PC, and then storing them somewhere else. So that might be on an external drive, that might
have been on a DVD, it could be on a memory stick. Now, generally speaking, when you're
working on your PC, you might not be able to see that copy of your files because it might be
stored away on an external drive, but you would know where they were physically located.
And the reason why you'd store them externally on something else would be that if your PC
broke, you would have a copy that was safe, and you could restore all of those files. So when
you're thinking about OneDrive and cloud storage, it's kind of similar. OneDrive essentially takes
copies of your files, and they're kept somewhere that you can't actually see them, the copies are
taken wirelessly, so the folders and files are copied to a location that you might not be aware of.
So, I use OneDrive for all of my files storage. But I also use other programs like Dropbox and
Google Drive.
Now I've no idea physically where my files are, I'm just trusting that those service providers have
them stored away safely for me. And it doesn't really matter to me too much that I don't know
where those files are physically stored, as long as I can still access them whenever I need to. So
that's one part of OneDrive that you need to be aware of. The other part of OneDrive, which is
important is that OneDrive includes the facility to keep these two copies in step with each other.
So essentially, I can set OneDrive up on my Windows 10 PC to keep in step with the copy in my
cloud storage. Now, up until Windows 8, OneDrive was effectively an entirely separate thing.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

But with Windows 10, it's been built into Windows 10 which makes it really, really easy to use.
So let's go through how it all works.
So, let me show you how you can sign in to access OneDrive. As I mentioned, you need to have
a Microsoft Account. So I'm going to log in to office.com. And you can see here because I've
logged in before, it's telling me “Welcome back”, I'm going to click Sign in. And it takes me into
essentially Office 365 or Microsoft 365 as it's known nowadays. And I have access to all of my
applications, the online version of my applications, and one of them is OneDrive. So let's jump
into that.
So, the first thing worth pointing out here is that the files that I'm seeing are not the same files as
the ones I see on my PC. So if I pull up File Explorer, you can see here that under This PC, I
have all of these folders. But my folders in OneDrive are very different. They're two separate
things. And all of these folders are located in the cloud. Now the amount of storage that you get
in OneDrive depends on the plan that you've selected. So, there is a free account you can utilize
OneDrive for free. And with a free account you get five gig of file storage. You can upgrade that
for a very low price to 50 gig. Or you can have a premium account, which is what I have, where
you get one terabyte of storage.
Now bear in mind at the time of writing this course, those limits were correct. But Microsoft
could at any time changed those limits. So, just bear that in mind and double check on the web
before you choose what you want to do. So, what I'm looking at here in this online portal is I'm
clicked on my files, and I'm seeing the files that I have. So if I double click on Documents, I
have numerous different folders. And I'm actually going to display these in a list because it's a bit
easier to see. So, these are all the files and folders that I have in OneDrive stored in the cloud.
Now, if I pull up File Explorer, and I'm actually just going to use the Snapping feature here so
we can get a side by side. You'll see that within File Explorer, I have my link to OneDrive just
here. And if I expand that out, expand Documents, and click on Work Files, you'll see that these
folders in File Explorer, exactly match the folders that I have in my cloud storage. And that's
because I have these two synchronized.
Now, when I'm working in File Explorer with these OneDrive files, what I'm looking at is not
actually the contents of OneDrive itself, I'm looking at a copy of that contents on my PC. And it
works like this so that you can still look at what is in OneDrive when you don't have a
connection to the Internet. So, if you can imagine if my internet connection went down, I
wouldn't be able to access any of my files in OneDrive because I wouldn't be able to open a
browser to get to OneDrive.
However, because I have copies on my PC, I can still access my files and work on them. And all
that would happen is that once my internet connection has been reestablished, OneDrive will
synchronize everything back to the cloud. So any changes I've made, whilst I've been offline,
will then synchronize automatically. So, I'm going to open this Blog Posts folder in File
Explorer. And you can see I have some additional folders in there. And I'm going to open the
Blog Posts folder in OneDrive. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new document
and you can see how it synchronizes.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So, I'm going to very quickly open Word, I'm going to create a new blank document, I'm going
to put some test text in there. And I'm just going to save this into that Blog Posts folder. So, I'm
going to click on Browse, I'm going to scroll up, and I'm going to select my OneDrive
documents, Work Files and Blog Posts, And we're just gonna call this BLOG-Using OneDrive.
And I'm gonna click Save. So, now you can see there it is in File Explorer, BLOG-Using
OneDrive. And you should see in a moment, and this can sometimes take a few seconds to
happen, you'll see that file appear in this folder. And there we go.
So, you can now see that that BLOG-Using OneDrive has now synchronized from my PC into
the cloud. And incidentally, once a file has been synchronized, you can see here in File Explorer,
it has a little green checkmark next to it. So now let's look at the reverse. If I go into OneDrive,
and I select that blog post that we've just uploaded, and I delete it, watch what happens in File
Explorer, you can see that it deletes it from there as well. So the synchronization is pretty fast. So
we can see pretty clearly there how those two are linked together. And the copy of my PC is
always being synced with the copy in the cloud.
Now there are some important aspects of OneDrive set up that I need to run through with you.
Now if you look down in my Notifications area, you can see that I have sort of cloud icon. And
that is actually my OneDrive and it lets me know the status of my OneDrive at all times. Now if I
click on this little icon, you can see all of the last files that have been synchronized, and there is
the one at the top that we've just removed. But if we click on these three dots at the bottom to go
into More, this is where you'll find all of your settings for OneDrive. And this is super important
to come into because there's lots of things you may want to customize.
So, I'm going to jump into Settings, and this first option under General; “Start OneDrive
automatically when I sign into Windows”. So, if you want OneDrive to start up and be available
down in that little Notifications area, then you're probably going to want to tick this option just
here. Now I have mine unchecked, because I like to, in general, have OneDrive turned off when
I'm recording videos. But normally, I would have a tick in this box. Now the most important tab
here is this Account tab, as this is the tab where you can link your OneDrive through to your PC
and your Microsoft Account.
So, my account is already sitting there. but if you wanted to, you can go through, click on Add an
account, go through the wizard and set up OneDrive in that way. Similarly, if I didn't want to
have my files being synchronized to my PC, maybe I've got some space issues and I want to keep
those off of my PC and just store them in the cloud, I can choose to “unlink this PC”. And it's
also worth noting that you don't have to synchronize all of your OneDrive folders. So, it might be
that you have lots and lots of pictures in your OneDrive account. But you don't necessarily need
access to those on a day to day basis.
So, if you jump into Choose folders, this is where you can go through and you can select which
folders you want to appear in File Explorer, and which ones you're happy just to keep in Cloud
Storage. So, you can see there I have a few folders that I like to be synchronized across both
mainly for ease of access. But there's also other folders that I'm not keeping in sync. So definitely
go in there and customize which folders you want to synchronize across.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So, those are the main settings within OneDrive, have a little play around with those. And with
this, it's very much just getting your head around that concept of having your files in the cloud
but also being able to synchronize them so that you can access them very easily from File
Explorer. Hopefully, that demystifies OneDrive a little bit for you. That's it for this module. I
will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Recycle Bin

Deborah: Hello everyone, welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module, we're
gonna be talking a little bit about the Recycle Bin. And most of us have probably used the
Recycle Bin at some point or another. And most of us have probably accidentally deleted
something that we later needed. So it's important for you to know how to recover deleted files
and folders. And often, the Recycle Bin can be your savior.
So we're going to start out by talking about Using the Recycle Bin, I'm going to show you how
you can Restore Deleted Items. I'm going to show you how you can Locate your Deleted Items,
how you can Permanently Delete Items, and also some tips for Managing the Recycle Bin. So,
let's start out with using the Recycle Bin.
If you look at my desktop, you'll see that one of the icons that I do have on my desktop is the
Recycle Bin. And you'll probably find that when you first load up Windows 10, this will be one
of the default icons or the default shortcuts that's been added to your desktop. And if I double
click on this icon, it's going to take me straight in to my Recycle Bin. And you can see that I
have quite a lot of files and folders in here that have been deleted.
Now I'm actually going to jump across to a different folder. So, I'm going to go back to that my
Pictures folder on This PC. And I'm going to change the View so that we can see these pictures
to Large Icons. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete a couple of these pictures. So, I'm
going to select this one, hold down Control and select this one. Now in order to delete these,
we've seen this already, I can just press the Delete key on my keyboard and those will disappear
from the folder. But it's worth noting that these are not permanently deleted.
When you delete items, they will go into your Recycle Bin. So, if I now double click to reopen
up that Recycle Bin, you should be able to see those two pictures that I've deleted. Now they're
not currently at the top of the list due to the way that I have this list sorted. So, I'm going to sort
by this column, Date Deleted, by just clicking on the top there. And right at the top now we have
those two files that I've just deleted.
Now I will say that there are some situations where files don't go into the Recycle Bin. So, if
you're deleting files and folders over network, then those won't go into the Recycle Bin. And also
certain types of item don't go in there as well. But here, we're just talking about general files and
folders. When you delete, they will go into your Recycle Bin, giving you the opportunity to
restore them if you decide at a later point that you want them back. So I'm going to restore these
two items, I'm going to click the top one, hold down Control, click the next one. And on the
ribbon just here I have the option; “restore the selected items”.
They've now been moved from my Recycle Bin and they will always be restored back to the
folder that you originally deleted them from. Now when it comes to restoring files, if the item or
items that you deleted was some time ago. And I may have deleted lots of other things in
between. When you go into the Recycle Bin, there are tools you can use to help you find the
items that you need to restore. Because, they might not always be at the top of that list.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Remember you have at the top here, the Search box to help you so you can search the Recycle
Bin. So for example, if I type in Nepal, and click on the arrow, it's going to pull back everything
related to Nepal. And remember that you also get that Search Tools Ribbon at the top. So if
you're looking for something in particular, you have all of these refinement options. So you can
search by Date Modified, you can search by Type, you can also search by Size. So, all of the
usual searching tools apply when you're looking for something in particular in your Recycle Bin.
Now it's worth noting that you can also permanently delete items. So when you do your original
delete, your item will go into the Recycle Bin. So let's use this blog as an example. If you want to
restore that item, you can click on, “restore the selected item” in the ribbon. Alternatively, you
can right-click and select restore. But if you delete it from the Recycle Bin, that's going to delete
it permanently. And you can see as I've done that, I now get this message; “Are you sure you
want to permanently delete this file”?
And once you do that, it's pretty difficult to get it back. In fact, it's virtually impossible to get it
back. So, the Recycle Bin is kind of in the middle there as your safety net. Now I'm sure that I
want to permanently delete this. So I'm going to click on Yes, and that is now gone forget.
Another thing you also might want to utilize on this Manage Ribbon is this Empty Recycle Bin.
So, as you continue to delete things, the number of items you have in this Recycle Bin is going to
build up and that can sometimes build to quite a large size. And these items do take up space on
your C drive.
So, it might be periodically, you want to go in, check the items that you have in your Recycle
Bin, and just delete everything out of there permanently. And that is where this Empty Recycle
Bin option comes in. It's going to get rid of everything and decrease the amount of space you're
using on your C drive. Now if I just jump back to Pictures just here, if I want to permanently
delete files straight away, so essentially, if I want to bypass that Recycle Bin and permanently
delete a file, I can do that.
All I need to do is hold down the Shift key and press Delete. And you can see straightaway it's
asking me; “Do you want to permanently delete this file”? Now I'm going to say no because I
want to use that file later. But that is how you would do it by just adding in that Shift key.
That is pretty much it on the Recycle Bin. Very simple, very straightforward. I will see you in
the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 04

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We've made it all
the way down to exercise four and this is a very easy exercise to describe.
In the Exercises Folder that you should have downloaded onto your PC, there is a folder called
SimonSezIT-Win10-Exercise-04-Dolomites-Pics. And you can see that this is the folder that I
currently have open on my PC. And within this folder we have five image files. And what I want
you to do is I want you to copy those files to a suitable location on your device.
You could leave them in the Exercise Folder if you want to. But what I want you to do is create a
new travel library and include that folder in your travel library. And that is pretty much it. I will
see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 7 – Family Accounts

Video: Family Accounts

Deborah: Hi guys, this is Deb and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We're going to
spend the next couple of modules looking at User Accounts. And in this particular module, we're
going to concentrate on Family Accounts. So we're going to start out by taking a look at Family
Accounts. And then we're going to walk through Children’s Accounts.
Now I'm logged into my PC as myself. And if you remember, I have a Microsoft account. And
what we're going to do is we're going to set up fictitious family members with fake email
addresses in this demo. Now in Windows 10, the management of family users is a very powerful
feature. So first, let's go in and take a look at our User Accounts. So I'm going to utilize this
Search bar to go to Settings, I'm going to jump to the Accounts section, and straight down to this
Family and Other users tab. And let's just make this window a little bit wider so we can easily
see what we're doing.
So you can see up here in this top section, it says Family and other users. And it says; “add your
families so everybody gets their own sign-in and desktop. And you can also help kids stay safe
with appropriate websites, time limits, apps and games”. And you can see underneath I have this
plus symbol, which will allow me to add my first family member. Now before we actually do
that, I'm going to click on this Learn More link just underneath. Now what this does is it takes us
through to an important page that explains the features of setting up a family for use on Windows
10 devices. And there's lots of really, really good useful information here. So if you do want to
set up a family on Windows 10, then this is a really, really great starting point.
So as you can see here, it talks you through the entire process of how you can actually log into
your Microsoft account, set up what we call a Family group, and then add members of your
family to that particular group. Now, it's worth noting just here in this little note box, it says;
“your family group is a way to manage how members of your family use their Microsoft
accounts. If you're just trying to add an account to your own PC, then C create a local user or
Admin Account in Windows 10”. So it's important to note the difference there between creating
Local Accounts on your PC and creating a family group where everyone is using Microsoft
Accounts.
So I'm going to jump back to Settings and I'm going to add a family member in by clicking on
Add a family member. I'm going to say Add a member. And it says; “members can be children
or adults. Children is safer when they have their own accounts”. So that is exactly what I'm going
to do. I'm going to add a child as a member. So I'm going to click down the bottom here and type
in the email address of the child I want to add. And click on Next. It's now saying; “confirm that
you want to add [email protected] to your family group and this device”. I do so
I'm going to click Confirm. And you can see here it says you invited chloesweeney2000 to be
added to your family group as a member. Until they accept the invitation from their email, they'll

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

be able to log into this device without family settings applied to their accounts. So that's a really
important point to note.
So now I've added Chloe as a user essentially as an account, she can access this PC, but any
settings that I've applied to the family as a group won't apply to her account until she's accepted
the invitation to be a member of that family. So what I'm going to do now is I am going to let
Chloe know that I've added her and remind her to check her email and accept the invitation. And
there we go. Now that Chloe has accepted that invitation, I can now see her listed underneath
here as part of my family. And you can see underneath that she is a child. And what I can do is
that I can then manage my Family Settings Online by clicking on this link.
Now once Chloe has accepted my invite to be a member of this family, when I jump into those
Family Settings Online, you can see that I have Chloe at the top there as a member of this family.
I'm listed underneath as the organizer. And then you can see I have lots of different options that I
can manage. So these help me control or even restrict what Chloe as a child can do. So for
example, if I click on Activity, it allows me to keep an eye on the sites that Chloe is accessing.
And if I want to, I can choose to get a weekly report of all of Chloe's activity on her account. So
I'm going to turn this toggle on. And I'm going to say that I want weekly reports emailed to me.
If I click on Screen time, this is where I can help her create healthy habits when it comes to using
her device. And I can set screen time limits. For example, down here underneath Device limits, if
I turn this slider on, I can go in and I can specify how much time this particular family member,
in this case Chloe, can spend using this device across each day. If I click on App and Games
limits, you can see here I get taken to this little wizard kind of a box. And it says it's going to
help me strike a balance in my child's daily life by setting up App and Game limits on all of their
devices across Windows, Xbox, and Android. And I can walk through a wizard to set up those
App and Game limits.
I also have links for things like Content restrictions. So I can set an age limit to block
inappropriate apps and games. And I can even click on this dropdown box, and only allow Apps
and Games that are rated for a certain age group. I can also control this spending via the
Spending link at the top. So for example, if I don't want Chloe just spending lots of money on
downloading items from the Windows Store, or maybe she uses a game that she's purchased and
that game has in-app purchases. If I want to control that to a certain extent and help Chloe shop
responsibly, I can change some of the settings underneath Spending in order to control that.
For example, I might require her to have my approval before she can buy anything. And also if
she does purchase something, I'm going to receive an email so I know exactly what it is that she's
purchased. So lots of ways there as an adult that you can control what your child family member
has access to. Then when it comes to setting up more family members who might not necessarily
be a child, you basically go through in exactly the same way by clicking on the Add a family
member button at the top here and working your way back through this wizard, selecting Add a
member, entering in their email address, so on and so forth.
So the whole process is fairly straightforward. So that’s it on Family and Child Accounts. Please
join me in the next module. We're going to go through some of the sign-in options that you have.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Sign-in Options

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be taking a look at sign-in options, and in particular some of the alternative sign-
in options that you have. And there's quite a few of them in Windows 10, something to suite
everybody, hopefully. And some of the other options that I'm going to show you are particularly
useful if you aren't particularly good at remembering passwords.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into Accounts again. So I'm going to go
back to Settings by searching for it, we're going to select Accounts. And one of the options we
have is Sign-in options. And you can see here we have a whole host of them. And I'm by no
means going to go through all of them. But we are going to look at a few of the more unusual
ones that you may not have come across before.
Now, most people are fairly familiar with signing in with some kind of password. So if you're
somebody who is fairly happy with that process, you have the option to set a password to sign-
into your device. You also have the option of setting up a Pin as opposed to a password and the
pin is what I use the majority of the time. And I will say up until I got my brand new laptop, I've
always used a pin to sign-into my laptop, because I tend to remember numbers more than I
remember letters. I don't know why that is, it's just how I work. So you can set a password.
Alternatively, you can have a pin.
Now as I said, I used a pin up until I purchased a brand new laptop. Because along with my
brand new laptop, an updated copy of Windows 10 came some additional options that I find
much quicker and easier to use when I'm trying to sign-in to my device. So what I now tend to
use is the Windows Hello Fingerprint scanner. Now this option won't be available to everybody,
it really depends if you have a fairly new device that has a fingerprint scanner area on it. Now, if
you're not sure what I mean by that, if I was to look at my keyboard, as I'm doing now,
underneath my number pad, I have a tiny little square, which allows me to rest my finger on it,
the device will scan my finger. And if it matches what it has stored, it's going to log me into my
PC. So it makes the whole process of logging in super-efficient and super quick for me.
So for those of you that do have a device that's capable of doing that, let me just show you very
quickly how you can set that up, it's super simple. We're going to click on Windows Hello,
Fingerprint. And I'm going to say set up. So you can see here it says; “say goodbye to entering
complex passwords and start using your fingerprint to unlock your device, verify your identity
and even buy things in the store”. So I'm going to click Get Started. And it's asking me to verify
my identity currently. So as I said, I currently use a pin, which I'm going to type in now. And it's
telling me to touch the fingerprint sensor. And I keep lifting and touching until it takes a full
copy of my fingerprint. And you can sometimes be doing this for a minute or so just to make
sure that the device picks up a full copy of your fingerprint.
But once it does, it's going to say; “all set, you can use your fingerprint next time you want to
unlock your device”, and click on Close. And that is it. So now when I log in, I just touch my
finger on the finger pad and I'm away. It logs me into my PC and I can start working, super-

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

efficient. Another option that you have on some newer devices is Windows Hello Face. So this is
essentially using facial recognition to recognize you as you, and that will sign you into your
device. So again, this relies on you having some kind of camera attached. And that might be an
inbuilt camera in your laptop, or maybe an external device. But again, if I click on Windows
Hello Face, it's a similar process.
I click on Setup, I click on Get started, it's asking me to enter in my pin. It does a quick scan of
my face. And once it's done, it says All set. I can click Close. And I can now sign-in to my
device using facial recognition. And if you do set one of these up, and then you decide at a later
point, you don't actually want to use that you have a Remove button in the bottom corner, which
will allow you just to remove that particular sign-in option. You can sign-in using a physical
security key. So that might be something that you've got stored on USB. Now, I don't know
many people that sign-into their laptop that way so I'm not going to go through that particular
option right now. But one that I do want to show you is Picture Password.
Essentially what you can do here is you can swipe and tap on your favorite photo to unlock your
device. So I'm going to say, okay, let's add a picture. It's asking me to verify my Microsoft
account, so I need to type in my password. Let's just read what we have on the left-hand side, it
says, “Welcome to Picture Password. Picture Password is a new way to help you protect your
touchscreen PC. You choose the picture, and the gestures you use with it to create a password
that is uniquely yours. Once you've chosen a picture, draw directly on the touch screen to create
a combination of circles, straight lines and taps. The size, position and direction of your gestures
become part of your Picture Password”.
So immediately, you can see here that a Picture Password is most suited to people who are using
either a touchscreen tablet style device, or a touchscreen laptop or PC. So let's click on Select
picture. And I'm going to utilize one of the pictures that I have in my Tracking in Nepal photo.
So let's use this one here of a lady in traditional dress, I'm going to say Open and you now get an
opportunity to reposition your picture. So I'm just going to move that up a little bit. And we're
going to say use this picture. Now it says; “draw three gestures on your picture, you can use any
combination of circles, straight lines and taps”. So my first gesture is going to be to tap on her
nose, my next gesture is going to be to draw a circle around her hand. My third gesture is going
to be to draw a straight line from her middle finger to her elbow. It's now asking me to confirm
my gestures.
So it says; “to finish setting up your Picture Password, just repeat your three gestures again”. So
I'm going to tap on her nose, I'm going to circle her hand, and I'm going to draw a line from the
end of her finger to her elbow. And it says; “Congratulations, you've successfully created your
Picture Password, use it next time you sign-into Windows”. And click Finish. So now we have a
really unique way of signing in using gestures and pictures that's going to be really hard for
somebody else to replicate accurately. So if you do use a touch device, remember that is a really
good option for protecting your PC. So that is pretty much it on sign-in options. Please join me in
the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 05

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. It's now time for us
to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section so far by working through exercise
five.
Now I'm currently in the Exercise Files Folder. And what I want you to do is to use one of the
pictures from here to set up a Picture Password. And you can use an alternative picture, if you
have one. I don't mind at all if you use a picture that you have stored off somewhere in one of
your folders. But if you don't, you can see here that the picture I have highlighted, the file name
is SimonSezIT-Win10-Exercise-05. This one is a good one to use.
So if you're going to use this particular picture for this exercise, I want you to base your three
gestures on tapping on the tip of his nose, doing a circle around one of his eyes, and maybe
drawing a line between his eyebrows. Now one thing just to warn you about when you are using
pictures is Picture Passwords. When you select a picture in the Settings area, Windows 10 will
resize it. So, not all pictures are going to be suitable to use as Picture Passwords. And you should
be okay with this one.
But if you are using a picture of your own and you're struggling a little bit with it, then it might
be for that reason. So just bear that in mind. So when you finish setting this up, make sure that
you do try it out just to make sure that it's working. And if you want to, you might want to try
setting up one of the other sign-in options as well. So maybe setting a pin or if you have an
appropriate device, setting up fingerprint scanning. Have a play around with those, see how you
go and I will see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 8 – Desktop Program Examples

Video: Desktop Program Examples

Deborah: Hi guys, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module, we're going
to be taking a look at Desktop Program Examples. And we're going to look at some of the
Desktop Applications in a little bit more detail.
So, I'm going to start out by talking to you about Desktop Programs versus Store Apps. I'm going
to show you an example of Notepad. And this is going to demonstrate a straightforward example
of a Menu System. I'm going to show you another example of WordPad. And then we're going to
talk about File Types and Default Programs. So let's start out with Desktop Programs versus
Store Apps.
Now, historically, most Desktop Applications in Windows had a set of standards. But the
problem is that these standards weren't policed or verified by Microsoft. So up until a few years
ago, if you bought a program to install onto your device, there was always a little bit of a chance
that it wouldn't work properly, or it might mess something else up. Or that it contained a virus or
some kind of malware. And partly was due to this freedom that inspired the introduction of more
controlled pieces of software. And one of the things about Store Apps is that they are by large,
validated and controlled.
So there's much less chance of something going wrong or downloading a virus from a Store app
than there is with a Desktop Program. With Store Apps, the store is really the only way that you
can get them. Whereas with something like a Desktop Program, you can download these from
any website available, you can install them, and away you go. Another key factor is that
generally speaking, Desktop Programs were primarily designed for use with a desktop PC,
keyboard, and mouse.
Now in more recent times, more, and more people are using things like touch. And the interfaces
in Desktop Applications are sometimes so complex that using a touch device is very difficult. So
Store Apps in general are more tilted towards people who use touch devices. But there are still
many people out there who do still use Desktop Programs. Now what has happened is that the
distinction between the two has become a bit blurred. So, it's often the case that a program will
be available in both versions.
Having said that, and in case of some of the more complex Desktop Programs, it's unlikely that
some of the more complex programs will be replaced by Store Apps anytime soon. So to get an
idea of this difference, think about what I've been telling you throughout this course, about the
Control Panel versus Settings. Control Panel is a Desktop Application. Whereas settings is sort
of a Store app. And you can see that we do some things in Control Panel, some things in
Settings, and sometimes you can do both of those things in both Control Panel and Settings.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So what I'm going to do in this module is to demo some of the main features of each. And we're
going to use a couple of Windows accessories as examples of Desktop Programs, and show some
of the main features. Now Windows accessories, in general is a good example, as traditionally,
the Windows accessories were all Desktop Programs. Whereas now, they're starting to become
Store Apps. And a good example of that is something like the Calculator. The Calculator used to
be a Desktop Program. But now, it is essentially a Store app. So what I want to do first is to show
you an example of a Desktop Application that has a Menu System. And we've used this
application in other modules, but it's just a really good one to demonstrate this.
I'm going to use Notepad, I'm going to click it in the list to open it up. And you can see here with
Notepad, it uses a dropdown Menu System, as opposed to that new ribbon structure that we've
seen in some of our other applications. Some of the key features Desktop apps generally have
our windows control buttons. So up in the top right-hand corner, you'll always see a minimize
button, a maximize button, and a close button that is standard across your Desktop Applications.
And with these menu options, they give you access to various other options. So whenever you
see a menu item that has three dots after it like this Print command, the three dots in general
means that it's going to invoke some kind of dialogue to do more things.
So if I was to click on Print, you can see it's going to open up my print dialog ready for me to
make my printer selections, my setting selections, and then print. So the idea behind a Menu
System is that you simply select what it is that you want to do. Now, when it comes to this
Notepad application, the main part of the application is really just a sheet of paper that you can
write on. So I can click in here, and I can start typing. If I want to save this file, I go up to my
Menu System, I select File, I go down to Save As. Notice that Save As has those three dots. So
it's going to invoke a dialog box, in this case, the Save As dialog box. I can then select my
location. And I'm just going to save this to my Desktop. And then at the bottom, we have some
controls, we can type in our file name, and we can also select our file type.
Now the file type really depends on the type of file you're creating. So any file that you want to
save from Notepad is essentially a text file. Hence why the Save As type is .txt. So I'm going to
give this file a name, I'm just going to call it Quick Fox, and click on Save. And because I've
saved that to my Desktop, you'll see it appear just here, Quick Fox.txt. So Notepad is a great
example of a classic Desktop Application. And once you're used to how these menus work, if
you open another classic Desktop Program, you're going to know how to do things because
everything is very similar.
There's always going to be a File menu for example, there's always going to be a Close button in
the top right-hand corner. It has a standard, and it has consistency. And consistency is really one
of the big advantages of Windows.
Now with Store Apps, it's a little bit of a different story. There's not so much of a level of
consistency. Developers from all over the world can create Store Apps and make them available
for you to download. But there's no consistency amongst all developers in the world. And so, you
get variations from app to app. So let's now look at a similar example to Notepad, but this time
using an app. So for this, I'm going to use an app called WordPad. I'm going to search for it. So

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Windows 10 for Beginners

we're gonna type in a WordPad. There it is the top of the list. You can see underneath it says that
it is an app, I'm going to click to open.
Now straightaway, you can see a big difference between WordPad and Notepad that we were
looking at previously. WordPad, you uses a Ribbon Interface. So we have our commands
running horizontally across the top of the screen, as opposed to in dropdown menus. Now
WordPad is a straightforward app, but it does have an advantage over Notepad. As you can do
things like include pictures and format the text. So let's suppose I wanted to start to write a
document. Once again, having clicked in the main area of the document, I can start typing. So
once again, I'm just going to add some test text into here.
What I can then do is I can select using the mouse. And I can do many different things with this
piece of text. For example, I can change the alignment. So I could move it into the center by
clicking on the Center align button in the Paragraph group, I can change the font to something
completely different. I can make that font a lot larger, I can change the color of that font, so let's
change it to bright red. I can do multiple things with this text. None of those can be done in
Notepad.
Now I just want to point out that this isn't meant to be any kind of tutorial on how to use
WordPad. It's merely just a lesson in trying to show you the key controls. Now something else I
can do in an app like this, which I can't do in the Notepad desktop app, is I can insert pictures. So
I'm going to jump up to Picture on my Home ribbon, select Picture, I can navigate to my Pictures
folder. And I'm going to select my picture, say Open, and insert that picture into the document.
So by using WordPad over Notepad, I can do a lot more things and I can build up a much more
attractive looking document.
Now even though we have a Ribbon System in this app, I can still go to File in order to find my
Save As options. Now if I wanted to, I could save this document as a plain text document. But
it's worth noting that if you do that, you're going to lose any pictures or images that you've
inserted into the WordPad file. So your best way to maintain the integrity of everything that
you've put into this file is just save it as a rich text document. And you can see rich text
documents have the file extension RTF. I'm gonna give it a file name, I'm going to save it to my
Desktop, and click on Save. Now with apps that use this ribbon system, there is a useful feature
called the QAT or the Quick Access Toolbar. And you'll find the Quick Access Toolbar right at
the top of the screen here.
Now currently, I have three icons on my Quick Access Toolbar; I have Save, I have Undo, and I
also have Redo. I then have this little dropdown arrow at the bottom. And if I wanted to, I could
show this below my ribbon instead of above. Now, I actually prefer that because I find
sometimes when it's tucked away right up in the top corner, I kind of forget that it's there. So I
always like to move it underneath the ribbon. Now what the Quick Access toolbar is, is it's a way
for you to access commands that you use frequently very quickly.
So for example, if I find that I'm inserting a lot of pictures into my document, I might want to
add this Pictures command onto my quick access toolbar. And you can do this with any
command that you see on these ribbons. All you need to do is right-click, and you'll have an

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

option “add to Quick Access Toolbar”, and now I have that command there. When I click on it,
it's going to let me select another picture to insert into my document. So customizing this Quick
Access Toolbar is a really good way of making you more efficient when you're working in apps
that have this Ribbon Menu System.
And of course, if you want to remove from the Quick Access toolbar, you can right-click and
you have a Remove option in there as well. So I'm going to use my Save button just to save my
changes, click on the cross in the top right-hand corner to close the application down. Now let's
move on to talking about File Types and Default Programs.
So I'm in the Course Files folder. And if you look through this list, you'll see that I have one file,
that's called Notepad test.txt. If I double click to open this, it's going to open that file in Notepad.
Now I don't only have the option of opening this file in Notepad. If I close this down, if you
right-click on any file in the contextual menu, you'll see that you will always have this “Open
with” option. And above the line in this menu that pops out to the side, it's going to show the
application that most suits the file type of that particular file. So this is a .txt file. So of course,
it's given me as suggestions, the two applications that most suit that and that is Notepad and also
WordPad.
However, if I downloaded another app which could open text files, then I might want to say
“choose another app”, and then go and select that app. Alternatively, I have an option to search
in the Microsoft Store, there might be another application that opens text files really nicely that I
might want to download. So the thing you need to remember here is that if you just double click
to open a file, by default, Windows is going to open that file in the default application, which for
a txt file is always going to be Notepad.
Now if we look at a different file type a little bit further up, I have a document here called Inca
Trail.rtf. So that is a Rich Text Format document. And you can see the icon that it's been
assigned is a Word icon. So essentially, Windows 10 believes this to be a Microsoft Word file.
But if I right-click on this file and go to “Open with”, it gives me Word as my default. But if I
click More Apps, it's then showing me other applications that I can use to open this particular
file. So I can open it in some web browsers, I can open it in Notepad, Paint, so on and so forth.
So what I could do is instead of opening it in Word, which is the default for this file, I could
select WordPad and click on Ok. And that file is going to open.
Now in Windows 10, the program that opens when you double click is called the Default
Program. And you can control these from within Settings. So I've opened up Settings, I'm going
to jump into this Apps area. And you can see that from that list on the left-hand side, we have an
option for Default apps. And this is where you'll find a list of the default apps. So you can see
here that for my email, if I click on an email, it's going to open in my Mail app. And if I scroll
down, you can see that my default web browser is Google Chrome, so on and so forth.
I also have an option here to choose default applications by File Type. So if I just pick some in
this list, let's go down to .aac file. So a lot of music files will have the file extension .aac. And
currently, if I was just to double click on an AAC file, it's going to open in the Groove Music
app. Now I actually prefer to listen to my music on Windows Media Player. So I'm going to

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

change the default by clicking and selecting Windows Media Player, like so. So very simple to
change your Default Applications.
So, that is it on Desktop Programs and Store Apps. Please join me in the next module where
we're going to be doing exercise six.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 06

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We're down to
exercise six. And, this is a very simple exercise with a very simple solution. What I want you to
do is essentially create an RTF file with photos. So you can see an example of mine up here.
So we have a file that has numerous different pictures in it. Some of this text is formatted, it's
aligned to the center, it's underlined, and we have our subheadings here in blue. So what I want
you to do is essentially create your own RTF file. Now you can use the pictures that are supplied
in the Exercise Files folder, or you can download your own image files for use.
I want you to make sure that you do include pictures and formatting and that you do some basic
text formatting. However, I would like you to finish up with an RTF file that's been saved,
whichever way you do it. That's it for now, I will see you in the next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 9 – Store Apps

Video: Store Apps

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In the previous
module, we were looking at Desktop Apps. And we're now going to be turning our focus towards
Store Apps, or more specifically, Universal Apps.
Now, when we say universal, what we really mean there is just apps that run on PCs and tablets,
but also on things like Windows phones. So we're going to start with an overview of Store Apps,
we're going to look first of all at the Calculator as a Store app and its main features. And then
we're gonna look at a more complex app like Maps.
Now the main focus in this module is the actual apps themselves as opposed to the Store. We're
gonna look at the store in the next module. Now in general, it's fair to say that Store Apps are
more flexible in Windows 10. You can run them full screen, or you can run them in Window.
And you can also get apps to share the screen utilizing that snapping feature in Windows 10.
Now Store Apps really are designed for touch or touch devices. But they can almost always be
used with a keyboard and mouse as well. So there are only really two ways of getting Store
Apps. They’re either supplied or installed as part of Windows 10. So there are several apps. And
you can see some of them on my tiles here that are part of Windows 10. And I would say that
roughly 25 to 30 Store Apps come included when you purchase a copy of Windows 10.
Now the other way to get hold of an app is by downloading it from the Windows Store. And
we're going to look at that in the next section. But just be aware that the list of Store Apps that
are available by default in Windows 10 changes all the time. So by the time you come to run this
course, you might find that you have slightly different apps available to you by default in
Windows 10 than what I have here. So let's start out by taking a look at a Store App that's built
into Windows 10. And a good example of one is the Calculator.
So I'm going to scroll down as I'm already there. And you can see here underneath C, I have the
Calculator. So let's fire that up. So this is essentially an app. And it's one of the ones that's
available by default when you purchase a copy of Windows 10. Now the Calculator is kind of a
special case. It's one of those apps that used to be one of the standard accessories. But now, it's a
Store app. And you can see that now I've loaded it up, it's loaded up in a very small window. But
I can make this full size if I want to by clicking on the maximize button so that it covers my
entire screen. I'm going to minimize that down again.
And of course, like with any window, I can pick this up and I can drag it around and place it in
different parts of the screen. And I can operate this either with my finger if I'm using a touch
device, or with my mouse and keyboard. So I have a laptop with a touchscreen. So I'm going to
do a quick calculation, let's just do eight, multiplied by three divided by two equals, and there I
get my results. So fairly simple and straightforward. Now there are a number of options with this

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

app, you'll see that there are three lines. And when I hover over it says “Open Navigation”. And
this gives me a little menu. So I can change the type of calculator that I'm using. So currently,
I'm just using the Standard Calculator. But I have options of Scientific, Programmer, and Date
Calculation. And I also have some options for Converters as well. So currency conversion,
volume, length, weight and mass, which can sometimes be really, really useful.
So for example, if I was to select currency, you can see here that mine defaults from United
States dollar to euro. So I could type in $500. And that automatically tells me what that is in
euro. So some additional functionality there built into the Calculator. Some other things I have
within this window, I have this little keep on top button. So that can sometimes be useful if you
have a lot of different apps open and you want to keep that Calculator to be on top so it doesn't
matter where you click, you're always going to be able to see that Calculator, then that's a nice
option to apply.
And you also have a History button just here. So that will allow me to see all of the previous
calculations that I've done. And if I want to, I can rerun by selecting. Now one controversial
feature of many Store Apps is that very often how they operate will depend on the device that
you're running it on. So if I just show you an example of that we've just seen that recent history
area. But if I was to maximize this app, so you can see that history has kind of changed, I'm now
getting this pane down the right-hand side, which is going to be showing me all of my history. So
simply by maximizing this app to full screen, certain things have changed position on the app.
Now the point really I'm trying to make here is just to really be careful with Store Apps, because
they can change the way they look and operate depending on the device you're using, or the
various orientations. Now, the Calculator is a fairly simple app. So let's move on to looking at a
more sophisticated app. And for that, I'm going to search for Maps. And you can see here the
best match at the top there is Maps, I can see that it is an app. So I'm going to click to open
Maps.
Now if this is the first time that you're opening Maps, you're going to get this little pop up, which
says; “let Maps access your precise location”. So I'm going to say “Yes”. Now Maps is a
particularly powerful app. And apart from its mapping capabilities, it can give you directions for
driving and also walking. And you mostly need an internet connection to use the Maps app. But
you don't need an internet connection for absolutely everything. Now, because this Maps app is
quite complex, there's a lot you can do with it. I'm only going to go through and point out some
of the main items now.
Now, as you saw just there, it asked me to confirm my location, which I did. So that means that
Maps will start using my IP address of my computer to make a guess of where I am. Now, how
accurate this is, it's sometimes a little bit off. But it looks to me like this is pretty much got it
fairly accurate as to where I'm currently located. Now, a key point here when we're using Maps,
if this was a conventional Desktop Applications, it would have to have a Menu System, or some
kind of Ribbon Interface. And you can see here that this doesn't because it is an app. But this
Maps app does do so much that the user interface has had to be thought out quite cleverly.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now, how you navigate your way around this map is really going to depend on if you're using a
keyboard and a mouse, or if you're using a touch device. Now I'm fortunate that I have both, I'm
using a laptop which has a keyboard and a mouse, but it also has a touch screen so I'm going to
try and demonstrate both of them to you. So for example, I can use my finger just to drag and
move around this map. I can use two fingers to zoom in and zoom out again. But if I want to use
my keyboard and mouse, I can pick up my mouse, click, and drag the map around. And I can
also use the scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in and zoom out as well. It's also worth noting
this little pop up bar that we have here has a plus and minus icon. So again, that's gonna let me
zoom in or zoom out even further.
You also have a few other buttons on here. So you have one for, “Show my location”, and you
also have a Tilt option. So if you kind of want to see things in more of a perspective view, so
now I'm kind of looking up towards the north of England, I can do that as well. Now some other
useful things that we have within this app. If I jump up to this dropdown where we have Map
Views, I'm currently looking at the Road View, but I do also have an Aerial View that I can
switch to, which gives me a slightly different way of looking at this map. Now I'm going to
switch back to Road. And if I wanted to, I could check the Traffic Conditions, I could turn that
on. And it's going to show me any incidents and also where there are any traffic cameras as well.
I have an option to turn street side on or off. And you'll see that I've got Windows Ink turned on
as well. Now, we haven't discussed Windows Ink yet, but it's gonna allow me to essentially I can
draw things on this map if I wanted to. So a few useful options under there as well. And of
course, one of the big things that you might want to do when you're using Maps is to get
directions. And you'll see up here in the top left-hand corner, we have a Directions option. So I
can choose a starting point. So I'm going to say my location, and my destination is going to be
the city of Birmingham. And I'm going to say, “Get directions”. And there we go.
I can see it's telling me all of the different routes as I hover over the different routes, it's telling
me how long it's going to take me to get there. So for this particular route, it's 2:44 minutes. If I
was to take this one, it's 2:50 this one, 3:09 minutes, so on and so forth. I can also see this
information for if I was driving, if I was taking public transport, and it even goes so far as to
show me the different train lines in order to get from London to Birmingham. And then the final
option is walking. Now it is a little bit far I don't think I'm really going to want to walk from
London to Birmingham. But if you did want to maybe you're doing some kind of cross country
hike, you can see, it's still gonna give me those directions, it's gonna take me 38:45 minutes, so I
think I will stick to driving.
But hopefully that gives you an idea as to how easy it is just to find directions within the Maps
app. You'll see that we also have a little gear icon here or cog option, which just gives me small
ways of filtering my results essentially. So if I want to get from London to Birmingham and I
want to avoid all toll roads, I can select this option. It will recalibrate and then it will give me my
options.
In the next module, we're going to explore the Windows Store, how you can download and
install apps. So please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: The Microsoft Store

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to take a browse through the Windows Store. So I'm going to click on the Start
Menu, and if you recall, we added the Microsoft Store as a tile into our Start Menu. So I'm going
to click on this just to load up the Windows Store.
So what we're going to look at in this module is we're going to go through the different
Categories that you have in the Microsoft Store. I'm going to go through with you how you can
search for apps in the Microsoft Store, I'm going to take a look at some of the options that you
have underneath your Account. I'm going to show you how you can download or install apps
from the Microsoft Store. And then finally, we're just going to have a browse around and take a
look at the different Store Apps that you can download. So let's start out by talking about
Categories.
So when you enter the store, you're going to see a page that looks something like this. Now
again, just bear in mind that when you come to do this course, this might look slightly different.
Microsoft loves to change things all the time. But it should hopefully look something along the
same lines as this. And what you'll normally see is a kind of like a highlights package or
highlights page on that first screen. So you can see here we have things like Best entertainment
apps are highlighted. We have maybe a new game like this one here, Sea of Thieves, which
they're promoting. And we have various other different sections and categories that we can
browse.
So as I scroll down, it's shown me “Picks for me”, so that's based on things that I've searched for
before. And you can see some of the “Most popular” apps that have been downloaded. We've got
the top free apps, the top free games. And there's also things like Windows themes that you can
download as well. We've got movies, TV shows, and then we have a series of different
collections at the bottom. So your apps are kind of grouped into categories. Now I'm going to be
discussing apps in this particular module as opposed to games. So what I can do is click on the
top apps. And that's going to take me through to this page showing me all of the top apps ready
to download. You'll also see running across the top, we have a small menu. So I'm currently
clicked on Home, I have a gaming section, entertainment, productivity, and deals right at the end.
Now, if I jump back into top apps again, this is basically a filtered list. So essentially, the page
that you go to every single time no matter what category you click on, is the same page. It's just
applying different filters to that page so you can see what you're looking for. And I can see all of
my filters that are applied running across the top here. So you can see, it's just showing all of the
bestselling apps from the department apps. It's showing me all categories, and all ratings. So
essentially, what I can do is if I want to change my search, if I'm looking for something else, I
can apply different filters in order to achieve that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So for example, if I was looking for an app related to reading, I might go to this category
dropdown and choose to search just in the Books and Reference category. So using these filters
is good if you're sort of more interested in having a browse through and seeing what apps are
available. It might be that when you come to the store that you know exactly what it is that
you're looking for. And you'd probably be better suited to use the Search bar at the top here if
you do know the name of the app. So again, if I was looking for the Kindle app, I can type that
in, hit Enter. And it's going to pull back all of the apps that have Kindle somewhere in the title or
the description.
Now one thing you might have noticed when I use this Search bar, if I remove that, again, let's
search for something else. Let's do Twitter. You can see I get a dropdown menu. So again, the
store is suggesting to me apps that I might want to download that are related to my search term.
Now one of the points to note here is that you can see that the top one there is Twitter, which is
exactly what I'm looking for. But underneath you can see that it says owned. So you'll see that if
this is an app that you've already downloaded and is available on your PC. So this essentially
prevents you from downloading the same app twice. That's particularly useful. If it's a paid app,
you really don't want to be downloading and paying for again, something that you've forgotten
that you downloaded a while ago.
Now, I'm going to clear this search, I'm actually going to search for a different app, I'm going to
search for an app called Lightroom. So I do a lot of photo editing, I'm very much into
photography. So I have a lot of apps related to photography on my PC and also on my phone.
And Adobe Lightroom is one of my favorite apps. You can see it's the first one here in the list.
So I'm just going to click on it. And this is the kind of standard thing that you will see when you
click on an app. So it's going to give you the corporation that it comes from. So in this case,
Adobe, the category it falls under, Photo and Video, and it's going to give you a little description
of what that app does. And also more importantly, a star rating above.
Now, if I'm not sure if I want to download this app, sometimes it's useful to be able to read
reviews. So if I click on these stars, it's going to jump me down to the Reviews area, where I can
then go through and see what other people have downloaded this app have thought of this app.
And you can see here, there's actually quite a few people in there who didn't like it so much. So I
may want to revise if I actually do want to download this app at all. Over on the right-hand side,
you can see it's telling me that this app is free, and also that it offers in-app purchases.
So this is a really important point to make. Because I know that sometimes I've downloaded an
app that is supposedly completely free. And then I find that when I open it, there's really not a
great deal that I can do unless I pay additional money. So again, be very wary of that and check
to make sure that the functionality you need to get out of the app is available. So just be a little
bit careful of that when you're downloading your apps.
Now I'm going to download this app and to do it, all you do is click on the Get button. And you
can see now I'm getting a progress bars was telling me that it's downloading Adobe Lightroom.
It's worth noting that as this is downloading, if you cast your eyes into the top right-hand corner,
you can see I have a little down arrow with a number one next to it. If I click that, that's going to

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

take me into my Downloads and Updates area where you can see your download queue at the
top. So currently, I have Adobe Lightroom. And again, I can see the progress. It's also showing
me in there all of my recent activity. So all of the apps that I've downloaded recently. Now if I
just click Back to go back to the page that we were on, another way of getting to that Updates
area is to click on the three dots in the top right-hand corner, and going to Downloads and
Updates. And there we go. It's finished downloading, and is now essentially within my library of
apps.
So when I click on All Owned, I can see basically all of the apps that I own, and I can also filter
by apps that I've got installed, we've seen downloads in there and any that are ready to install.
Now something that's really important to point out here is if we click these three dots, again, you
can see we have a number of different options. So we're currently in Downloads and Updates.
And I would always advise you to go in and check your Settings. Now you can see here
automatically that I have mine set to “Update apps automatically”. So some apps you'll find have
very regular updates from the developer. And if you don't have updates set to automatic, it means
that you're going to receive a notification when that app needs to be updated. And you'll need to
go in and do it manually.
Now, I personally prefer to have my apps updating automatically. A lot of the time, I don't even
know that they've been updated as I'm not having to go in and manually update them. But it
might be that you like to have that manual control. And if you do, you're gonna want to toggle
this first slider off. You can see I also have Live Tiles turned on. So we've discussed that
previously. So if I have an app, it's going to be shown as a Live Tile in my Start Menu. I've got
Video Autoplay set to on. And the other option that's important in here is this Purchase sign-in as
well. So if you're somebody who purchases a lot of apps, you can make that process a lot more
efficient and quicker for yourself by turning this on.
So that means that you can essentially purchase apps without a password. It saves you having to
type your password in for faster checkout. You'll see that as soon as I turned that on, Windows is
now asking me to identify myself. And because of the way that I have Windows set up, it's
asking me to scan my fingerprint on the fingerprint reader. So if I tap my finger, I can now
£essentially purchase things from the Microsoft Store without having to type in a password. So
definitely go into those Settings and set everything up in the way that best suits you.
Now, if we go back to these three ellipses, you can see that there's lots of different things in here
and most of these are fairly self-explanatory. You have a Wish list. So if you have some apps
that you would like to download, or maybe purchase, you don't have to do it immediately. But
you can essentially add them to your Wish list. So for example, if I do a search for a different
app entirely, so I'm going to type in photo, and I'm going to say Photoshop Elements 2020,
which is photo editing software. I can see here that this is an app that I have to buy at £66
pounds, which is quite expensive. Maybe I want to wait until next month to do that.
What I can do is I can select Wish list, it's telling me; “this item was added to my Wish list”. I'm
going to close that down. And now if I go back to my ellipsis, if I click on Wish list, it's going to
show me everything that I've added to my Wish list. And you can see here there is Adobe

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Photoshop Elements 2020 at the top of that list. The other options I have in here are things like
Redeem a code. So that's fairly straightforward. If you have some kind of discount code for a
particular app, then you can redeem that just there. And you can also View your own account
and check your Payment options.
Now, for obvious reasons, I'm not going to jump into here because I don't particularly want
everybody watching this course to be able to see things like my credit card information. But this
is where you can go to set up how you're going to pay for things that you download from the
store. And then finally at the bottom, you have that Send Feedback link. So I'm going to close
down the Store just by clicking on the cross. And I'm going to jump back to my Start Menu. And
what you can see is now at the top of my menu, under the Recently added header, I've got Adobe
Lightroom.
And of course, as we've seen before, I can right-click and I can say Pin to Start, in order to get
that there as a tile. I can move that tile around. I can right-click and I have more options in here.
And I could even pin it to the taskbar if I wanted to, to make it super-efficient to access. So that
is pretty much it on navigating the Microsoft Store, downloading applications and also doing
things like checking and managing your updates and your settings. That's it for this module, I
will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Apps and Modes

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to talk about Apps and Modes. Now in several of the more recent modules that we've
done, we've been looking at Desktop versus Store Apps. And in this module, I want to look at
some of the features of running Store Apps in Desktop Mode, and Desktop Apps in Tablet Mode.
Now in some of the more recent versions of Windows, so something like Windows 8.1, there
were a lot more restrictions than there are in Windows 10. So I'm going to cover some of the key
points that you need to be aware of. So you can see here, I've started up four Store Apps. And in
Desktop Mode, they work in a similar way to the way that Desktop Applications work in terms
of the Windows. So you can see that for each app that I have open, I have that Close button in
the top right-hand corner, I have the Minimize, and also the Maximize button. I can drag all of
these apps around if I want to, and I can also utilize that Snapping feature that we have built into
Windows 10.
Now one of the things I want to point out with Store Apps is that although you can resize them,
they do all have some sort of minimum width and height restrictions. So essentially, you can
only resize them by so much. So a good example of this is the Calculator. So I'm going to close
down the Windows Store app, I'm just going to quickly search for Calculator again. What I'm
going to do is I'm going to maximize it and then I'm going to try and drag it down so that it
neatly fits into this little snapped area. And you'll see as I drag down and let go, and I want
Windows Media Player in the other area. Can you see here that the Calculator kind of overlaps
that Windows Media Player? And it doesn't matter if I try and drag it, it only goes so far. So I
can't actually stop that from overlapping the window above.
So that is a good example of restrictions when it comes to resizing app windows. Now of course,
there is a way for you to get around this, you could right-click on the Status bar. And you might
want to do something like cascade all of the windows. And then you can easily click between
them. Or you can utilize that Alt Tab function, which will allow you to tab between the different
apps. You also have other options in here for showing your windows side by side. And I can also
show windows stacked on top of each other if I wanted to. Now I'm going to close down some of
these apps because we have quite a few open. Now the other thing to be aware of is some of the
options that you have in the Start Menu.
So in Desktop Mode, if I want to scroll through this list, I can utilize the scroll bar and use my
mouse to scroll up and down. You can also use the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one
to move through that particular list. Now again, looking at these tiles, I have quite a few tiles in
here. And once you start adding things as tiles, this area can get quite congested. So you can
resize this Start window to a certain extent by just dragging it out to give yourself more room.
But if you need even more room than that, imagine you've got lots and lots of tiles here and
you're having to scroll up and down to see them all. Remember that there is a setting you can
turn on.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So let's jump back into Settings and go to Personalization. And we're gonna jump straight down
to Start. And this little toggle here, Use Start full screen, I'm going to toggle that on, close down
Settings. And now when I go to Start, you can see it's just the tiles on this screen. So essentially
is a lot easier for me to see if I've got a lot of tiles there. Now I don't actually like to have that
setting on. So I'm going to go back in, and just very quickly turn that off. So now let's switch into
Tablet Mode and look at some of the factors affecting Desktop Applications.
So if you remember we go to our Action Center, and we have our Tablet Mode button which I'm
going to turn on. So now I'm going to operate everything using my finger and my touch device.
So I want to find the WordPad app to open it, I don't have it as a tile on my main Start screen. So
what I can do is I can tap the All Apps icon, and I can use my finger to scroll through. And I
know that WordPad is under Windows accessories, WordPad. Now in Tablet Mode, you can see
that WordPad automatically starts in full screen. If I try and restore it down by tapping on the
Restore button in the top right-hand corner, it doesn't work, it stays in full screen mode. So
essentially, what I'm saying here is that for some of these apps, and WordPad is one of them, you
can only run them in full screen if you're using Tablet Mode.
Now, obviously, there are one or two exceptions to this. But for the most part, that is the general
rule. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my Start Menu, and I am going to open
up Notepad this time. So again, that's underneath Windows accessories, and we'll tap on
Notepad. And again, you'll see what I mean. It opens up in full screen, and I am unable to restore
that app down. So with these apps opening in full screen, it makes it a bit more difficult to be
able to switch between different apps because I can't minimize Notepad down to see anything
that's underneath it. So this is where I would probably use something like Task View Mode. And
you'll find that in the Status bar at the bottom.
I'm just going to tap on it. And it shows me all of the windows that I have open. And I can then if
I want to, just tap on WordPad in order to switch to that app. Now when I'm working in Tablet
Mode, I can still utilize things like the Snapping feature. So if I wanted to snap WordPad, I can
just grab the top bar with my finger, drag down, I can drag over and it's going to snap it. I can
then choose the application that I want to fill the other half of that screen and I'm going to tap on
Notepad. And there we go. So that feature still works in Tablet Mode.
So that is a very quick run through of some of the differences with apps when working in
Desktop Mode versus Tablet Mode. That is it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 10 – Connecting to the Internet

Video: Connecting to the Internet

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to talk about connecting to the Internet. Now, most things that you're going to be
doing will involve accessing the internet at some point or another. And it's something that we've
barely mentioned so far in this course, even though it's probably the thing that we all do the most
often.
So in this module, we're going to focus on Internet Access. I'm going to start out by talking to
you a little bit about Internet Connections, I'm going to explain the difference between Public
and Private Networks. And then we're going to jump into our Network and Sharing center. So
let's start out by talking about Internet Connections. And really, what we're going to concentrate
on is a standard Internet Connection. So, for someone who is using a PC or a laptop at home.
Now, these days, the most common arrangement is that you will have some kind of router that is
connected to an internet service provider or ISP, as you might know it using a cable. So in my
case, my local telephone company has provided the box and the signals use the phone lines.
Now, some people do have other setups, some people have things like satellite connections, but
in the majority of cases, people will have some kind of wired connection. Now how you actually
connect to that box from your PC is a different matter.
So traditionally, or historically, people have connected their laptop or their PC, to their router
using an Ethernet cable. I'm old enough to remember those days of having to plug my laptop into
my router to try and access the internet. But these days, most commonly, people will connect
wirelessly over Wi-Fi. And in order to do that, you need to have a wireless device within your
tablet, your laptop or your PC. And I will say that most devices that you'll buy these days already
have that built into them.
Now in some rare cases, if your PC doesn't have a wireless device, maybe you have a really,
really old laptop, you can buy something that you can plug in. Or you could go back to that old
traditional method of using an Ethernet cable to plug directly into the router. Now in this module,
I'm going to make the assumption that you can connect wirelessly as that is the most common.
So a basic starting point for connecting to the internet is that we need to have some kind of
router. And we also need to have a wireless device built into whichever device we're using, our
PC or our laptop.
Or if you're using a device which is set up for Wi-Fi which I am, if you look down in the
Notifications area, you'll be able to see this little Wi-Fi icon. And it's this one just here that kind
of looks like these rays emanating from the corner. And as I hover over it, you can see it's telling
me in a little pop up message, the name of the router that I'm currently connected to. And it's
telling me that I currently have internet access. And I can see by the fact that all of these bars are

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

white, that I have a really strong signal. Now when I click on this, you'll see that I now get a list
of router IDs.
So essentially, my device can connect to lots of different routers. Now the one that I'm currently
connected to is at the top of the list, it's telling me that I am connected and secured. And if I
wanted to, I could choose to disconnect from my internet just by clicking that Disconnect button.
Now these other ones that you can see listed are not actually located in my house. So essentially,
I'm picking up the routers of my neighbors. And you might think to yourself, well, can't I just
select one of my neighbors’ and utilize their Wi-Fi.
Firstly, I wouldn't advise that you'll have some very angry neighbors. But secondly, if you do try
and do that you're going to be asked for a password. So for example, I can't just click on this
second one in the list BTHub6 and say Connect, because it's going to ask me to enter the network
security key. Now normally, when you receive your router, your network security key is printed
either on the bottom or on the side. And you'll normally be given a little card by the engineer as
well with those details on it.
So the first time you connect your device wirelessly to your router, you have your security key.
Now you'll see underneath where it's got the name of my router and it says connect and secured,
I have a little link to properties. So if I click on that it's going to jump me across into Settings.
And you can see the name of my router listed at the top there. And you can see that I have this
little toggle turned on, so that it will connect automatically when in range. Now I like to have this
toggled on so that as soon as I boot up my PC, I don't have to do anything, it automatically
connects to my Wi-Fi.
Now the next options that I have are related to my network profile. And you see that I have
options for Public and Private. And I currently have Public selected. So it says; “Your PC is
hidden from other devices on the network and can't be used for printer and file sharing”. And the
second option, Private; “For network you trust such as at home or work, your PC is discoverable
and can be used for printer and file sharing if you set it up”. So I might decide to choose this
second option if I kind of wanted to create like a mini private network amongst my family.
So within my household, we might have three or four different laptops for different family
members, we're all attached to the same Wi-Fi. So essentially, we can create our own little
private network, which will enable us to do things really easily like share files, and also do things
like connect to a shared printer. Now I actually don't share any files or a printer with anyone in
my household, so I'm happy to leave mine on public. Another option we have in here is Random
hardware addresses.
So you can essentially use Random hardware addresses to make it harder for people to track your
location when you connect to this Wi-Fi network. So for example, if you have lots of apps,
which do things like use your location, such as the Maps app that we looked at earlier, if you
would prefer that your location wasn't disclosed, you could choose to use a random address for
this network. We then have some options in here for a Metered Connection. Now I don't have a
Metered Connection, but a lot of people do. Now a metered connection is more like a controlled
connection. So it means that you essentially pay only for the time that you're connected, or for a

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

specific amount of data. So there might be some instances where you want to turn off your
metered connection.
For example, if you're downloading an application that's very large, you don't want that
download to fail because you've gone over your data limit for the day. So this really applies to
people who fall into that kind of scenario. And as we move down towards the bottom, we just
have some information about our IP settings, and also some Properties related to my router. So
really, it is important to come in here and check these settings to make sure that you can make a
wireless connection to your router. And if you can't, you should be able to make a wired
connection using something like an Ethernet cable.
If you're not sure what I mean by that you can get hold of Ethernet cables very easily. And most
devices have some kind of Ethernet ports on them. So it's really simply a case of connecting up
your device from the Ethernet port to the Ethernet port on the router. Now, I will say that using
this method is sometimes not the most convenient if you're anything like me. My router is
situated quite a long way from where I like to use my laptop. And sometimes it's quite hard to
find a cable that is long enough to stretch to the router. But it is an option if you don't have
wireless.
So pretty easy to set up your Wi-Fi. I will also say that if you purchase a brand new laptop, or
maybe a PC that has Windows 10 on it, as soon as you start up that laptop, Windows actually
walks you through the process of setting up your Wi-Fi connection. So it really makes it a really
efficient and simple process. Now having established a working connection, I really want to
focus the next few modules on browsing the internet using Edge and Internet Explorer. But
before we leave this module, I just want to cover one of the things I mentioned before, Network
Discovery.
So again, I'm going to jump back into Settings. I'm going to go to Network and Internet. I'm
going to click on the Status page and look at Sharing Options. Now if you remember before, we
were talking about Private and Public networks. And you can see here I have the Guest or Public
option expanded. And underneath it says; “Network discovery and File and Printer sharing”. So
as I mentioned in general, I'm not sharing any files or a printer with anybody else in my family.
So, I have Network Discovery turned off.
However if I turned this option on, I can then specify underneath what I want to actually share
with other members on my network. So you can see here; ‘When file and printing sharing is on
Files and Printers that you have shared from this computer can be accessed by people on this
network”. So this option basically allows my PC to be discoverable on the Private network,
which means that I can share Files and Printers with other members of my family. But it doesn't
let them access my PC. They can't just jump onto my PC and see my files.
So if I was to turn on File and Printer sharing, it's going to make it a lot more efficient for me to
share maybe photo albums, documents, things with other people in my family. And also, if we
have one printer in our household, it means that we can all use that printer. Now I'm going to
turn both of those options off. We also have the same options for a Private network as well. Now
the final option I want to talk to you about is the Network and Sharing center.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

So I'm going to jump back into Settings, we're going to go to Network and Internet. And right at
the bottom, we have a link to Network and Sharing Center. So this dialog box gives me access to
lots of options related to Networking. And at the top here, I have an indication of my current
active network. And if I want to change any of those settings, I can click on this little link just
here, which will take me in and I can see all of my settings. And I can also change some of these
settings if I need to.
Now we're not going to get too much into the technicalities of this, just be aware that if you have
to do something like that, this is where you're going to find those settings. Now for most of this
module, I've been describing how you connect to a router wirelessly. But there might be some
occasions where you need to set up some kind of network connection manually. And again, this
is where you come to do this. You can see here you have an option; “Set up a new connection, or
network”. And it gives you four options.
So it's going to allow you to connect to the internet, you can set up a new network, you can
manually connect to a wireless network, or you can connect to a workplace. So this last option
here, Connect to a workplace, this will cover situations such as one where you might have a
company laptop, and you work from home, but you need to connect to the work network using a
VPN or a virtual private network. If that is a case that applies to you, then this is the option that
you're going to need.
And the final option that we have here is Troubleshoot problems. So again, if you're having any
issues with your connection, or having any problems setting it up, or maybe it's just not
connecting, you can run through this troubleshooter to try and diagnose your problem. So again,
that's really just a pointer for you so you know where to go if you do run into any issues.
So that's it on this module for connecting to the Internet. We're now going to move into using
web browsers and the first one we're going to take a look at is Microsoft's newest browser,
Microsoft Edge. So please join me in the next module for that.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Microsoft Edge

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be taking a look at Microsoft's newest internet browser; Microsoft Edge. And you
may or may not have heard of Microsoft Edge. It's been around for a little while now. But to an
extent, it replaces Internet Explorer as the preferred web browser for Windows 10.
Now, I will say the Internet Explorer is still available. So if you like to use that, then no worries
at all, we are going to be covering Internet Explorer in the next module. And the reason why it's
still there, it's really more of a legacy piece of software now, because there are still many, many
websites that only work on or rely on Internet Explorer. But in this first module, we're going to
concentrate on Edge and its features.
So I'm going to start out by just giving you an overview of Microsoft Edge. I'm going to show
you how you can Search for Items and Browse for Websites, we're going to go through the
Microsoft Edge Settings. And finally, I'm going to introduce you to the Hub. So let's start out by
just getting familiar with how Microsoft Edge works.
Now, I actually have Microsoft Edge pinned in a few different locations. So you can see the icon
here on my Desktop. I also have it pinned down in my Taskbar. And if I go to my Start Menu,
you'll also see but it is one of my tiles, so I'm going to click to open up the browser. Now the
general look and feel of Microsoft Edge is a very clean looking browser. You can see right in the
middle here, we have our Universal Search so we can search the web. And you can see
underneath I have these little tiles, some of which are currently empty. But I can essentially add
websites that I visit frequently. And I haven't added any yet.
These first two, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Support, Those were added in when I purchased
my copy of Windows 10. But if you do want to add and customize this area, it's very simple to
do, just click the plus to add a site. I'm going to add the Financial Times and just paste in that
URL. And there you go. Simple as that, you have a quick title. Now you will see a lot of
similarities between Edge and Internet Explorer. And one of those similarities is that running
across the top you have this tab system.
So you can see I have one tab open currently. And if I want to open a new tab and essentially
have lots of different searches running, all I need to do is click on the plus. And you can see as I
hover over, the shortcut key for that is Ctrl + T. And that's going to open me up a brand new tab.
Similarly, if I want to close the tab, I have a little cross located to the right on each tab, I can
click it to close and the shortcut for that is Ctrl + W.
Now one of the things that's different between Edge and Internet Explorer is that with Edge you
have one central bar in the middle here, that's both an address bar and a search bar. So for
example, if all I wanted to do was go to the BBC website and catch up on the latest news, I can
click in this Search bar, type in BBC and I'm going to select news. And it's going to pull me back
my search results. It's also worth noting that all of the Microsoft browsers by default, use Bing as
their search engine as opposed to something like Google.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

I can then select the site that I'm looking for. And in this case, that's the BBC UK News page. So
let's take a look at some of the controls that we have in the Edge browser. And I will say that a
lot of these, again, are very similar to Internet Explorer. If we look over in the top left-hand
corner, we have our basic Navigation controls. So I can click to go Back to my search results. Or
maybe Forward again to the BBC homepage. I also have a Refresh button. And then I have a
Home link as well. So if I click on Home, it's going to take me back to where I started from.
Now moving across to the right-hand side you can see we have a number of different icons up
here and I'm going to cover those in a little while. Running down the right-hand side I have my
Scroll bar, so I can scroll up or I can scroll down to move up or down the current page. And
running across the top as is fairly standard with all browsers we have our Address bar. Now if I
wanted to navigate to the BBC news website from the address bar, all I would need to do is type
in www.BBC. And as I'm typing you can see the Edge is giving me suggestions or
recommendations of where I might be looking to go. So in this case, I am actually looking to go
to the news site, so I'm going to select this first link. And that's going to jump me straight back to
that news page.
Now, Edge is pretty intelligent in many different ways. So it does keep track of the sites that you
visited previously. So if I was to go to a site that I accessed frequently, which is a site called
Pexels, which is a royalty free image site, if I start typing p-e-x, because the browser knows that
I visited this site before, it's going to give me that website in my list of recommendations. I can
then just click, and it's going to jump me straight to that particular website. So let's now finish
out this module by looking at some of the settings that we have, and also some things which are
going to make your life a little bit easier and a little bit more efficient.
Now, if you're anything like me, there's kind of like maybe five to 10 websites that you visit on a
daily basis. That might be something like a news site, or maybe a weather site. Or maybe
websites which are more related to the work you do, and the interests that you have. And it can
be a little bit of a pain to every time you want to go to one of these sites having to come up to the
address bar and type that in. And so what you're probably going to want to do is bookmark sites
that you visit frequently. And that's a very simple process in most web browsers and in
particular, in Microsoft Edge.
So I'm currently on this BBC News homepage. And this is one that I look at every day to catch
up with what's going on in the world. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to add this website
to my Favorites. So all I need to do is navigate to the page. And then over on the right-hand side,
you can see I have this little star icon with a plus. It says; “Add this page to favorites”. I'm going
to click. It's telling me that a favorite has been added. And it's given me a chance to rename that
particular favorite. And what you'll find is that sometimes the name that is given by Edge is kind
of long, it's a bit too long for a favorite. You’re probably going to want something a little bit
more concise in there.
So in this case, I'm actually just going to delete out where it says Home, so that it just says BBC
News. And I'm going to say; “Add this on to my favorite bar”. So let's click Done. And you
might be wondering, well, where is your favorite spa. Currently, I'm not displaying my favorite

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

bar, this is a setting that you can turn off or on as you please. So if I want to turn my favorite bar
on, if I go to the ellipses right in the top right-hand corner, go down to Favorites. And you'll see
that there is an option, “For show favorite bar”. And currently mine says Never, I'm going to
change that to Always. And there we go, you can now see that my favorite bar has appeared at
the top, and I've already put on there links to websites that I visit all the time. And there on the
end is the one that I've just added.
And when it comes to managing these little favorite links, again, if we jump into the ellipses and
go down to Favorites, you can see you have an option there for Manage Favorites. It's going to
show you all of the websites that you've added. And this is where you can come in and you can
move them around if you want to reorganize the order in which they appear on that Favorites
Bar. And you can also do things like delete them, you can even create your own folders if you
want to start putting things into folders.
So I know that I in general have a lot of links that are related to design. And so I might choose to
create a new folder, call it Design, click on Save, I now have a folder. So I'm now going to go
back to Favorites Bar, and I'm going to move some of these websites into this design folder. So
I'm going to grab Shutterstock and move it to design. Pexels is also related to design, as is the
Noun Project. And there we go. So now if you look at my Favorites Bar, I'm only seeing the
links which aren't in that folder.
And currently way over on the right-hand side it says Other Favorites and there is my folder with
my websites. So what I might choose to do is if I click on the favorites, I'm going to just drag the
design folder and I'm going to put that on the end onto my favorite bar. So now when I click
design, I get all of those websites essentially grouped together. So this is a great way of
organizing your favorites particularly if you have a lot of favorites and you want to incorporate a
little bit more organization.
Now there are quite a lot of options incorporated into Microsoft Edge and I'm not going to go
through them all in this module. I'm just going to show you a few key ones and then leave you to
explore the rest. But something that's quite impressive if you to look at is if we click on the three
dots again, in the top right-hand corner, you have a Settings option just here. And this is going to
allow you to control all of your Microsoft Edge settings. So for example, from all of these
options running down the left-hand side, if I jump into Appearance, this is going to allow me to
do things like change the default theme that I'm using.
So I'm going to change this to dark, just so you can see how that works. I can change the zoom,
if I want to, I can choose if I want to show the home button. And I can also choose what I want
to make my home page. So for example, if when you open up a Microsoft Edge browser, you
want it to default to Google, then you could insert Google in here and make that the default web
page for your home screen. There's loads of other customizations in here when it comes to things
like showing the Favorites Bar, showing feedback button, so on and so forth. And you can also
modify the font size if you're struggling to read the information on the screen.
Now another thing you might want to do from here is set Microsoft Edge as your default
browser. So maybe you're on a social media site, so something like Facebook, or maybe Twitter.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Every time you click on a link, if you want Microsoft Edge to open up as opposed to a different
type of web browser, then you're going to want to come in here and make Edge the default by
clicking on this button. And as I said, there are so many different settings in here. So I'm going to
leave those for you to go through yourself.
And the final thing I'm just going to mention is clearing your history. So there might be some
times that you will need to clear your internet browsing history. So maybe you've been at work
and you've been looking at Facebook a little too much that day and you want to clear that history
out. And again, if you click on the three dots, you can see here underneath History, you have an
option to clear your browsing data.
So, that's a very quick tour of some of the key features of using Microsoft Edge. Please join me
in the next module where we're going to explore Internet Explorer.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Internet Explorer

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In the previous
module, we took a look at Microsoft's newest web browser; Microsoft Edge. And in this module,
we're going to take a look at Internet Explorer.
Now if you've used an earlier version of Windows, then you may well have used Internet
Explorer before. And despite the fact that Microsoft Edge has kind of replaced it in many
respects, it is still an integral part of Windows, but really kind of viewed as more of a legacy
browser these days. However, it is still pretty popular, and many people do still use it, hence why
we've included it in this course.
So I'm going to start out with an Overview of Internet Explorer. I'm going to walk you through
how to use Browser Tabs, I'm going to show you how you can use Zoom. And then finally, I'm
going to talk to you a little bit about some Alternative Browser Options. So the first thing we're
going to do is we're going to fire up Internet Explorer. Now I will say that Internet Explorer is
not something that I tend to use on a regular basis, I prefer to use Microsoft Edge. But I do still
have it on my laptop.
So I'm going to go down to the Start Menu, and I have it pinned just here. So let's fire up Internet
Explorer. So let's just run through the basic configuration of Internet Explorer. You can see at the
top there, we have that Standard Address bar, and that contains the address of the website that we
want to go to. And the Homepage here is MSN News. And of course, if I want to make
something else as my homepage, then I can do that from within Settings in Internet Explorer.
And we'll take a look at that a bit later on in this module.
So much like our last example of when we were using Edge, I'm going to navigate to the BBC
News website. So I'm going to jump up to the Address bar, I'm going to type in bbc.co.uk and hit
Enter. And it jumps me straightaway to that particular website. Now at the top all the way over
on the left-hand side, I have my Navigation buttons. So currently, you can see the only one that
is active is to go Back at the moment. And then I can also go Forward. Now when it comes to
refreshing pages in Internet Explorer, the Refresh button is located at the end of the Address bar.
So you can see it here next to the padlock. And I know that many people who use Internet
Explorer, love to use a keyboard shortcut for this, and the keyboard shortcut is F5.
Now at the top here on the right-hand side, I have a Search bar. So if I want to maybe jump to a
different website altogether, I can type it into here. So if I want to jump to the Financial Times,
and you can see as I type, I'm getting some Bing suggestions underneath. I can select the one I
want and it’s going to take me to the Bing search results for whatever I've typed in that search
box. And I'm going to jump back to the BBC website.
Now if we look at this Search box again, and click on the little dropdown arrow, you can see
here, this is telling me that Bing is my default search engine. Now it might be that you're
perfectly happy with using Bing. But if you wanted to add something like Google, you could
click on Add. And you could utilize one of the Internet Explorer add-ons. So for example,

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Google search, so I'm going to say add. And now when I go to that dropdown, you can see that I
also have Google as well as Bing. And all I need to do is select which one I want to utilize. So
I'm going to select Google, type in Financial Times again, and select it. And this time it's doing a
Google search as opposed to Bing.
Moving on that bar across to the icons over on the right-hand side we have our Home icon,
which is going to just take us back to that MSN homepage. And the star is where you can view
your favorites, your feeds, and your history. Now as with Microsoft Edge, if there are websites
that I like to access frequently, you can add those on to the Favorites Bar as well. Now my
Favorites Bar is showing but I don't currently have anything on it. So I'm going to add this BBC
Homepage to my Favorites Bar. And very simply, all you need to do is navigate to the page that
you want to add. And then on the left-hand side, you can see you have a star with a green arrow.
And when you hover over it says; “Add to Favorites Bar”. And there we go. I now have that link.
And if I want to manage those favorites again, if I go over to the right-hand side and click on the
star, I have an additional Add to Favorites option in there. So there are essentially two ways of
adding websites to your favorites. But I also have an option to organize my favorites. So I can do
things like move items around. And some of these websites that I've got listed here, I don't
actually have on my Favorites Bar. So for example, I'm going to move Bing up to my Favorites
Bar. And you can now see that that now appears next to the BBC homepage. You can also
rename any of your favorites from here as well, create new folders, delete links, everything you
need to organize your favorites is located in there.
Now, it's also worth noting the Internet Explorer is essentially a Desktop Application that uses a
Menu System rather than a Ribbon. Now you can't see the menus at the moment because you
need to turn them on. So if I hover my mouse right in this top bar, and right-click, you can see
here, I don't have Menu bar selected, I have a few others in here. But if I click on menu bar, I
now get this File, Edit, View, Favorites menu running across the top here. So if that's more
familiar to you, so if you think you're going to get on better adding favorites via a menu
dropdown, as opposed to looking for the particular icon, then that's probably something you're
going to want to turn on.
And let's just concentrate on these menus for the time being. If we go to File, you can see the
kinds of options that you have within File. So you can create a new tab from here. So if I click
that, I'm going to get a brand new tab. A quicker way of doing that is to click this little piece of
paper icon to the right-hand side. And that's going to give me a new tab as well. Now by default,
when you open new tabs, whilst they're going to be independent tabs, they are all going to be
within the same Internet Explorer window.
There might be times where you want a completely independent window. And that is where you
have this new window option, which is going to give you a brand new instance of Internet
Explorer. Now the rest of the options in here are fairly standard options that you would find
under a File menu. You have Open, Save As, you can print pages if you want. But let's jump
across to this Edit menu. Now one really nice option in here is the Find on this page. So the

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Windows 10 for Beginners

shortcut key for that is Ctrl F, it's gonna give you a find box at the top. And from there, I can
search for anything on this particular page.
So if I type in the word food, it's telling me that there are three matches. And I'm gonna say
highlight all of the matches, it's telling me that there are three matches, and I can navigate using
the previous and next options. But I can see just from this page that we're looking at now, I can
see the word food highlighted just here. So it's really useful if you're searching for something
particular on any web page.
Moving across to that View menu. This is where you can go in and turn those toolbars off and
on. And you can also do things like Zoom. So if say I want to zoom in to 200% to make
everything a little bit easier for you to read. And that is slightly too large for me. So I'm going to
zoom out to a 125. Again, we have a menu dropdown for our Favorites. So this is where you can
go to add favorite websites, add them to the Favorites Bar, and also organize your favorites. And
then finally, underneath tools, we have things like deleting browsing history, viewing our
downloads, and also things like the pop up blocker. So lots of important options there lurking
underneath that menu system.
Now the final thing I'd like to cover is just a little bit about alternative browsers. So we've looked
at the two main ones that Microsoft provide; Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
But there's a whole host of different options out there for you to explore. And it really comes
down to personal preference, what suits one person best might not suit another. But some of the
more popular browsers out there would be Google Chrome, which you can see here on the left-
hand side of my screen. And another really popular one is Firefox, which you can see on the
right-hand side of my screen.
There's also other browsers such as Opera that are becoming way more popular. And if you are a
Mac user, then you're probably going to be using Safari, which is the Mac's default web browser.
Now we'll say that most web browsers that you use kind of all operate in a similar way. When it
comes down to different settings, the way things look and feel, the themes you can apply, they’re
all slightly different. Now I like to have a selection, I have four different browsers available on
my laptop, and I kind of use them interchangeably.
Sometimes I prefer one and then other times, I might prefer another. But it's definitely worth
downloading at least a couple, using them, and seeing which one you prefer. That's it on Internet
Explorer. In the next module, we're going to be doing an exercise. So, I will see you there.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 07

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We've made it all
the way down to exercise seven. And this is a fairly straightforward exercise. So you can see on
the screen, I've opened up the Microsoft Edge web browser. And there are no input or output
files that you need for this exercise.
What I am going to do is I'm going to show you my answer. So I'm back at my homepage in
Edge, and I'm going to jump up to my ellipses in the top right-hand corner. I'm going to go down
to Favorites, and I'm going to go to Manage Favorites. And you can see here that I've set up a
new folder called Travel. And you can see that reflected in my Favorites Bar running across the
top. And within that folder, I have three travel websites. And if I click on any of these, so
Skyscanner, for example, it's going to jump me straight across to that website.
So what I want you to do is I want you to create a Favorites Folder for something that's of
interest to you, and add three favorite sites into that folder. And as you add them, the name that
Edge suggests will be quite long. So what I want you to do is shorten it, abbreviate it so it's nice
and easy to read.
So that's pretty much it for the exercise, but if you do want to do something extra, then you might
want to come into your Favorites Folder and just rearrange these icons into alphabetical order.
That's it for this exercise. I will see you in the next section.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 11 – Setting up Sounds and Playing Audio

Video: Setting Up Sounds and Playing Audio

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be taking a look at setting up Sounds and Playing Audio. Now when I say sounds,
I mean sounds on a PC, primarily how to play music. But we're also going to look at how to
record using your PC as well.
So we're going to start out by talking a little bit about making sure that your hardware is set up
correctly. We're going to talk a bit about playing music from CDs. I'm going to show you the
Media Library, I'm going to introduce you to Microsoft's New Music Playing app called Groove.
And then finally, we're going to speak about Recording. So let's start out by first talking about
setting up your hardware.
Now just to give you an idea of the kind of setup that I have, I'm using a laptop. And that laptop
has inbuilt speakers. But I'm also using a microphone in order to record this course. And I'm
using an external microphone that I have plugged into my laptop via USB. So everything I show
you related to sounds and audio settings is really going to revolve around my specific setup. So
some of the things I'm going to show you, you may have to modify the way that you have your
equipment set up. So I'm going to jump in and take a look at my configuration in more detail.
And the good news is that we can do this from either Control Panel or Settings.
So in the Search bar, I'm going to search for Sound. And you can see here, the first one at the top
Sound Settings. And the first page I’ve landed on here is the Sound page. And at the top here we
have Output, and it's asking me to choose my Output Device. Now, as I said, I'm using an
external microphone, and it's the one that you can see listed here. But this section, because it’s
Output, it’s related to Speakers. So for example, if I was to play some music on my laptop, where
is that music going to emanate from?
Currently for me, I'm not going to hear anything because I have an external microphone plugged
in. So if I was to play some music, I'm not going to hear anything until I unplugged that
microphone. And you can see here the master volume is actually muted. That's why I have a
cross next to the little speaker option just there. Now if I didn't have my external microphone
plugged in and I played a song, I would be able to hear that song coming from the speakers in
my laptop. So just be aware that my setup and configuration may be slightly different to yours.
So just remember, Output is your speaker's, Input is your microphone.
And you can see here as I'm speaking because I have my Yeti stereo microphone selected, as I
speak, you can see that the microphone is picking up my voice, which is exactly what I want,
because I'm recording a video. Now just to show you what this looks like in Control Panel,
because again, you do have a few more options when you access your Sound settings in Control
Panel.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

So over on the right-hand side where we have our links, I'm going to click on Sound Control
Panel. And this is where you have your four tabs running across the top. I'm currently clicked on
Playback. And this is going to show you exactly what it is that you're using. So you can see here
the one with the green tick is the Yeti stereo microphone, and that is the one that I'm using at the
moment for my speakers and my microphone. Now this one just here, and also this one up here,
those are both headsets that I own but are currently not connected up.
And finally this one in here relates to the speakers that are within my laptop. So if I jump across
to the Recording tab, we have something very similar in there, you can see the device that I'm
using in this list. If you want to click on it, you can drill down into Properties, and you have a
whole host of other options that you might want to change or at least look at. Now I will say for
the most part, Windows 10 is pretty good at picking up anything that you plug into your PC or
your laptop.
So when I first plugged my microphone into my laptop, it pretty much recognized it
straightaway, picked it up, I didn't really have to do anything too much. But if that doesn't
happen, and you find that you're speaking and it's not picking up your voice, then this is the area
that you're going to want to come to.
Now another area you can go to to manage your microphone and speakers is down in the
Notifications Area. So you can see here I have a microphone icon because I have an external
microphone plugged in. And if I actually click on that icon, it's going to jump me across to the
Microphone Area in settings. And in here we have some more settings that we can change.
So for example, I can choose to allow certain apps to access my microphone. Then underneath, I
have a series of Toggle Sliders where I can specify exactly which apps can utilize my
microphone. So I'm probably going to want to utilize my microphone for things like Cortana,
which rely on being able to recognize or pick up my voice. Similarly, if we stay down in that
Notifications Area, we have our Speaker Controls as well.
Now, as I said, my speakers are actually muted on my laptop, because I don't want my
microphone to pick up any sounds that are coming from my laptop. But if you want to quickly
just adjust the volume of your speakers, you can click on that. And you can drag the volume
control up and down to suit your own needs. So now let's move on to talking about playing
music.
Now in this day and age, you'll find that most people use some kind of streaming service in order
to play music. And I'm one of those people, I use Amazon Music and you can see that I've loaded
up my Amazon Music library onto the screen. And just for the record, Amazon Music is an app
that you can download from the Microsoft Store. And you can see at the top of my list there
Recently Added, I'm going to right-click, I'm going to pin that to Start. And I'm going to move
that across.
So with streaming services, it's super simple to compile your own playlists, add songs, and then
just play them through your laptop or your PC. It really is just a simple case of selecting your

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Windows 10 for Beginners

song, pressing play, and there we go. Now, whilst most of the world these days does use some
kind of streaming service, there are still some people who tend to like to play music using CDs.
Now I'm going to say before I try and demonstrate this to you, I'm going to do as best a job as I
can. But I actually don't have a CD player on my laptop, and you will find that many of the
newer PCs and mine is a very new PC, I've got it in the last few months, many of the latest PCs
don't come with any kind of CD player or DVD player. What they do come with is lots of
different ports. So if you are still someone who likes to play CDs, burn CDs, things like that,
then you can always buy an external CD or DVD drive and plug it in.
However, despite the fact that I don't have a CD player, I am going to show you where you need
to go if you are somebody who wants to do things like load music onto your PC from CDs.
Another way you can do this is to utilize a Windows Media Player. So again, I'm going to search
for it. There it is, it is an app and I'm going to click to open. And let's maximize this. So this is
kind of similar to some of these streaming services in a way. You can see on the left-hand side,
you can create your own playlists. And what will happen is that Windows Media Player will pick
up any music files that you have stored in the Music Folder on your C drive.
Now, as I said, I don't tend to keep music on my PC, I stream all of mine online. But if I did have
any files saved into the Music Folder on this PC, they would automatically be listed in Windows
Media Player. So what the general process would be if you wanted to import some songs from a
CD is that you would load the CD into the CD drive, whether that's internal or an external drive,
and a message will pop up from Windows 10. And it will ask you if you want to load these songs
into your library. So you select Yes, and it's going to copy those files across and put them into
your Music Library for you then to play.
Now, similarly, you can also do this the opposite way. So if you have songs, you can choose to
burn those onto a blank CD if you wanted to. Again, you would select all of the songs and in the
top right-hand corner, you have a Burn option. And you can see it says; “burn files to disk”. And
it really is a fairly straightforward process. Windows 10 does guide you through that. So if that's
something that you think you're going to want to do, that is where you have to go.
Now the third way that you can play music is using Microsoft's own music app. And this was
updated recently, it's now changed its name and it's called Groove. And it is a Store app for
streaming services and downloaded music. So let's search for it. There it is, Groove Music. Now
again, this service is going to automatically look for any music that you have stored in your
music folder. So you can see here in the middle, it says; “show us where to look for music”.
So if I click this link, you can see where it's searching. It's searching in C, Users, Debbie, Music.
So if I pull up finally Explorer, you can see it's actually this folder. But if we follow this path, if
we go C, Users, Debbie, Music. And as I said, I don't currently have any music saved into this
folder, hence why it's not pulling anything through into the Groove Music app.
Now the important thing here is that whilst this is the default folder that's going to search on your
PC for your music, you can add alternative folders. So maybe you have music files stored in

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Windows 10 for Beginners

other folders outside of this one just here, you can add as many folders as you like. And then
Groove will pull any relevant music files into your library for you.
Once you have them all in, it's a fairly straightforward interface. You can sort by songs, artists,
and albums. You can look for songs that you've recently played, you can show what's now
playing, and you can even create your own playlists by clicking on the plus button. So if I
wanted to create a playlist, I might do something like “Chillout Music”, click Create playlist.
And now I can add songs into this specific playlist. Don't forget at the bottom, you have a cog
icon as well, which is going to take you into your settings for Groove Music.
And again, up here you can specify where you want Groove to look for music, and it's going to
take you back to that same screen. There's other options that you can customize in here. So you
can get Groove to automatically retrieve things like Album Art. Also, you can change your
Mode, so Light, Dark, or Use System Setting. And if you're not a huge fan of this rather large
menu running down the side, you can click on those three lines, that's going to minimize that
menu. It just gives you more room in order to see and manage all of your music files.
Now the final thing I want to mention in this module is Recording. So you may have a time when
you want to record your own voice to make things like audio notes, maybe, or you may just want
to use your voice for speech recognition or maybe for Cortana. So the most important element
here is to make sure that your microphone is set up correctly. Now again, Microsoft has its own
inbuilt app for this and it's called the Voice Recorder. So I'm going to click and we're going to
search for the Voice Recorder. And there it is, let's click to open.
And if you have your microphone set up correctly, then it's going to allow you to go straight into
the app and just start recording your voice. If there is some problem with your microphone, then
you will get a warning message in the middle here, which is going to direct you to Settings just
to adjust or set up your microphone. So if you do get a message like that, it's worth jumping into
search just typing in Microphone, and selecting Microphone Setup. This is the little wizard that
you want to go through by clicking the Get Started button, which will take you through the
process of selecting and setting up your microphone. Reopen the Voice Recorder, and you
should be good to go.
So now in order to record my voice, all I need to do is click on this microphone icon. Hello, this
is Deb, it's the sixth of June 2020. And this is a test recording. Click on the stop button and then
it's going to load up that recording into this window. And of course I have some handy little
options at the bottom. So I can choose to Delete the recording that I've just done, I can Rename
the recording. So this is quite useful. I'm going to click on Rename, and I'm going to call this,
“Test Recording”.
I also have some basic editing in here. So I can choose to trim my clip. So this is quite good. If
you have a lot of maybe blank space at the beginning or end, then you can trim either end of your
recording, simply by moving these guides along, and then selecting Save. You can either choose
to save a copy. So essentially, it's going to save a new recording, the edited version. Or you can
choose to essentially overwrite your original. So I'm going to say Update Original. And now if I

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

was to play that, it's going to have the front and end trimmed off. And you can also share any
recordings that you have simply by clicking on the Share button.
We have a few different options there. I might choose to mail it to somebody, send it via Skype
or even send it to OneNote for Windows. So this is a nice place to keep things like voice note
recordings. So that is pretty much it on Setting up Sounds and Playing Audio. In the next
module, we're going to take a look at Pictures so please join me for that.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 12 - Pictures

Video: Pictures

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be looking at the wonderful world of Pictures, and specifically at Still Pictures. So
I'm going to start out by going through with you some Picture Sources and Formats. I'm going to
show you the Photos app that you get with Windows 10. I'm going to show you some Basic
Photo Editing techniques, and also how you can Share Photos.
Now when it comes to getting pictures, the most obvious way is to use a camera. Another way is
to get a picture sent to you that might be via email from somebody else. Or you can also
download pictures from the web. Alternatively, you might have a scanner where you've scanned
in pictures and save them off into a folder on your PC. Now whilst there are many different types
of pictures, the one that we're going to focus on in this module is Photos, which is probably the
most common form of picture you're going to deal with.
Now, sometimes you do have to be a little bit careful when you're downloading pictures from a
website. If you want to download something that you see, and it's purely for your own use, your
own personal use, then that's normally fine. However, if you want to use a picture from a website
in some kind of presentation, or maybe in a training video like I'm doing here, then you have to
be really careful about copyright. It's not the case that you can just jump onto any website, take
their picture, and then use it to promote your own company, yourself or any other material. If it's
just for personal use, most of the time, it's absolutely fine.
However, I always err on the side of caution when it comes to these kinds of things, which is
why I like to have a really good set of free resources for photos. And probably my favorite one is
the web page that I'm on now, it's called pexels.com. And this is a really great library that has
millions and millions of royalty free pictures for you to use. And you can use these in things like
PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, anything you like. And the thing I like most about
the pexels website is that it does have just a really clear simple interface. All you do is click in
this box and search for what it is that you want to find. So I'm going to say mountains, hit Enter,
and it pulls back all of these really great high quality images that you can click on and then
download for free.
Now remember, when you do download an image, and you can see it downloading there, it's
going to go into your Downloads folder on your PC. So pexels is a really great resource. Now
when it comes to actually downloading pictures that you find in a website, I'm going to show you
very quickly how to do that. But as I said, just please be careful when you're going to utilize
those photos. So I've just very quickly jumped on to Amazon, UK. I've done a quick search for
cameras, and maybe I decide that I really like this picture of a camera, and I want to download it.
All you do is when you see a picture on a website, if you right-click your mouse you will have
this option here Save image as.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now remember, this is going to default to the folder that you last utilized. So for me that is
Downloads. So you might want to go in and change that to your Pictures folder. And I'm actually
going to rename this file, I'm going to say Camera. And you can see here, it's gonna save it as a
JPG image file. Now if you're not sure about the different picture file formats, a JPG is a very
common format. And JPG is great because they compress the image without losing too much
quality. So it means you kind of get that really good balance between image quality and the
amount of space that's going to take up on your hard drive. So I'm going to click Save.
Now another type of file type that you'll see quite often is PNG. And that stands for Portable
Network Graphic. And all the time, this is used for normally drawn or painted graphics. So for
example, I've actually just done a search on PNG images, it's taking me to our website where we
have lots of lovely images of parrots. So if I right-click on this image, and go to Save image as,
you'll see that the file type there is different; PNG.
Other formats used when it comes to images are the GIF format that's very common, particularly
where the number of colors in the image is pretty limited. And you might also find BMP images
as well. But these are kind of dying out, but those tend to be associated with older images. And
before we get on to opening these images in our Photos app, there's something that I want you to
check first of all. If you remember from before, we were talking about default apps by file type.
So I'm going to jump into here and I'm going to say Default apps. And I'm going to go right
down to the bottom and choose this link, choose Default Applications by file type.
Now we came into here in a previous module, this is where you can set the default application
that each file type is going to open in. So what I want to do is I want to go through this list and
make sure that any JPSs or any PNGs are going to open in the Photos app. So let's scroll down to
the J's. And you can see there we've got JPEG, and .jpg, and both of those open in that default
Photos app. Remember if you click, you can choose an application. Now some of the ones that
I'm being offered here are some of the older applications.
So you've probably used Paint before if you are a Windows user, we're probably all very familiar
with using paint. There's also a new one, a new app that's been added into Windows 10, called
Paint 3d, you have Snip and Sketch or you can look for another app in the Microsoft Store. Now,
I'm just going to quickly check that the PNG files open in the same app. There we go. And I can
see that this default is set correctly as well. So it makes sure that those file types are set to open
in the Photos app before you continue.
So I'm back in my Pictures folder in File Explorer. And I have a folder here called Nature, which
contains some really nice high quality JPGs of different scenes within nature. So what I'm going
to do is I'm going to open one of these and because I know the default app is Photos, I'm fairly
confident it's going to open in the correct application, I'm going to maximize that. Now you have
a number of tools within this Photos app.
In the top left-hand corner, you can click on See all photos. And this is going to take me into a
gallery of all of my photos. Now, I'm not going to scroll down because this contains a lot of the
personal folders from my personal OneDrive account. Now how do you know which folder the
Photos app is picking up those files from? Well, if you click on the three dots in the top right-

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Windows 10 for Beginners

hand corner and go down to Settings, you can see here it's looking in
C:\Users\deb_a\OneDrive\Pictures. Now I don't actually want it to look in here because this is
where I keep all of my personal stuff. So I'm going to say Add a folder, and I'm going to select
Pictures. And now I have that specific folder listed there, I'm actually going to delete this one out
or remove the folder. So let's close down Settings. Let's reopen this again. And if I click on See
all photos, now I'm just seeing those photos I have in that Nature folder that's within my Pictures
folder. So remember, always go into Settings and add in any folders where you want the Photos
app to pick up photos from.
Now, if you want to start creating things like photo albums, you have an Add to button at the top
here. And you can create a new album and I'm going to call this Flowers, click Create album, and
this item has now been added to Flowers. I can click View album, and there we go. Now once
I'm in my album, and this currently only has one picture, I can do things like modify the title by
clicking on that Edit link. So I might want to say Flowers and Nature. And click on Done.
Now the other controls I have running across the top, I have a Zoom button. So I can choose to
zoom in, I can pick up my mouse and move it around. If I have a touch screen, I can use my
finger, and I can move the picture around as well. And I'm going to zoom all the way back out. I
have a Delete button to delete that picture. I can choose to add it to my Favorites. So I want to
create a list of all of my favorite pictures. That's particularly good if you do a lot of photo
editing. You have a rotate button, which will allow you to rotate that picture around. And I also
have a Crop utility up here as well. So I'm actually going to do some cropping on this.
I'm going to drag this down a little bit. And in fact, I'm just going to have the little face of the
squirrel like so. I'm going to go down to the bottom, I'm going to click Save a copy, and there we
go. My image has now been edited. The final group of options on the right-hand side here I have
a Search. So this is going to allow me to search using this image. So you can see it says; “Bing
will process the image and may use it to improve Bing image processing services”. So what this
will do is essentially searches Bing for this picture. And it's going to show me all of the images
that either match this picture and the websites that they belong to. And you can see that the first
website there is the actual website where I downloaded this from and that is pexels.com, that free
photo resource. Then underneath it has similar images as well.
So that's really nice being able to search on a picture. We then have an Edit and Create button.
So again, I can do things like make changes to this picture. So we've seen how you can crop, you
also have some rotate and flip options. So I can flip this picture around. At the top here I have
Filters. So if I want to enhance or add a nice effect to this picture, I can go through the different
options that I have underneath Filter. And then I can do some more granular adjustments. So I
can up the clarity or I can pull it back down again, I can add a vignette. So that is kind of a
shadowing that comes in from the sides, which sometimes can look really nice.
I can remove Red eye. Now this is particularly relevant for this squirrel picture. But in pictures
of people, some people particularly people with blue eyes are susceptible to red eyes in pictures,
you may want to remove the red eye. And also Spot fix will allow you to remove any small spots
and blemishes from the picture. So lots of different adjustments that you can make there.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

We then have the Share button. So if you want to share this picture, you can share it via email,
you can maybe send it via Bluetooth, if you're near somebody else who has a Bluetooth device,
or you have a few other different options that you can utilize. You can copy it, you can send it
straight through to Twitter. But in this case, I'm going to select mail, it's going to open up the
Mail app, it's coming from me and I can select who I want to send this image to, and click on the
Send button.
And then finally right at the end there if I want to print the image, I have the Print button, which
the shortcut key for that is Ctrl P. So quite a few things that you can do in this photo app. And as
always, go through everything that you have within Settings prior to really getting going with
photos just to make sure that you have everything set up so that it suits you. So that's pretty much
it on Pictures, downloading them, and utilizing that Photo app. Please join me in the next module
where we're going to talk about Movies and TV.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Movies and TV

Deborah: Hello again, and welcome back to our course on Windows 10. In this module, we're
going to take a look at Movies and TV. And you probably won't be surprised to learn that
Windows 10 does include a specific app when it comes to watching Movies and TV on your PC,
laptop, or tablets.
So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take a look at the Movies and TVs app, I'm
going to show you how you can Download Movies from the Windows Store. And I'm going to
talk to you just a little bit more about Playing DVDs. Now the Movies and TVs app has
undergone a bit of a name change, it did used to be called films and TV, but now it is called
Movies and TV.
So if we search for it, there is the app at the top and I'm going to click to open. And as always,
I'm going to maximize that so it takes up all of the space on the screen. Now again, this is a very
simple app, we have a very simple interface to navigate. Now, if you look at the menu running
across the top, where we have Explore, Purchased, and Personal, the one I'm currently clicked on
is Personal. And underneath, I have three options that I can select; Video folders, Removable
storage, and Media servers. And you can see that I have a couple of videos already in my library.
And again, this works in a very similar way to the Photos app.
When you open up the Movies and TVs app, it automatically scans your Videos folder, and
anything it finds in there, it's going to pull into the app. So if I pull up File Explorer, I'm
currently clicked on the videos folder. And you can see sitting in there are the two videos that I
have contained within the Movies and TV app. So if you want the app to pick up any mp4 files,
movie files that you download, you can just move them into this videos folder. And of course, if
you want to, you can create sub folders off of that to organize them a little bit better.
Now again, the same thing with this app. If we click on the three dots in the top right-hand
corner and go down to Settings, you can change that search location if you want. So underneath
your videos, we have a link for; “choose where we look for videos”. And again, you can see in
here it's going to look in C:\Users\deb_a\Videos. So if I have videos stored somewhere else, so
maybe I want it to look in the Downloads folder, I can click that say add this folder to videos.
And now it's going to include any relevant files that are contained in both of those folders and
pull them into the Movies and TVs app.
Now another way of getting to that area instead of going up here and going through settings is
simply to click on the Add folders button. And you can go in and add your folders in that way.
Now these other two links up here; Removable storage, and Media servers. This will pick up any
files that you have stored on either a removable device. So maybe you have movie or video files
stored on a USB stick, you can pick those up from here. Or if you're connected to any type of
media server, then you can pull videos through from there as well.
Now when I play one of these videos, and I'm just going to play this one just here. Now be aware
that these don't actually have sound, but you do get a very nice image and you can see at the

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Windows 10 for Beginners

bottom we have a certain amount of control. So I can click on pause to pause that video, I can
skip back 10 seconds or forward 30 seconds, I can show a menu for subtitles and audio. And I
can also change the volume of the clip whilst I'm playing the clip. On the right-hand side I have
some other icons.
So this first one here is Edit in Photos, now I'm going to come back to that in a moment. The
next one is Play in mini views. If I click that, it's just going to make that a really small little mini
player in the top corner. I can choose to play in full screen. So that's going to get rid of my
Taskbar and anything around the outside. Then finally I have those three ellipses again where I
can do things like Cast to a device, Zoom to fill, I can Repeat, Autoplay, and also Play as a 360
video.
Now this Edit in photos option is going to allow me to make some minor editing changes to this
video. So for example, if I want to trim some blank space off the front of the end, I can definitely
do that. I can draw, I can create a slow motion video, or I can save a photo from a video as well.
So if I click Save Photo from Video, it's gonna allow me using these arrows at the bottom to skip
through this video frame by frame. Then once I find the frame that I want, I can essentially take a
snapshot of that particular frame and save it as an individual photo simply by clicking the Save a
Photo link at the top there.
Now apart from playing videos that I've made myself, I can also play Movies and TV that I've
got from other sources. So one of the biggest sources for Movies and TV shows is going to be
the Windows Store. So again, let's click on the Start Menu and jump into the Windows Store. So
what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump across to Entertainment using this link. And you can
see here, I can now see a list of all of the new films, I can click into any of these categories if I'm
searching for more movies. Alternatively, I can use the search bar at the top to search for
something specific.
So if I wanted to download one of these movies, I just need to click on the movie, and then I get
a choice of renting this movie, or buying it. So remember, again, you'll need to be signed in with
your Microsoft account in order to make any purchases in the Microsoft Store. But once you
select to buy, it's going to download. And then when you open that movie, it's going to open in
the Movies and TV app. Now another thing that you can also do is you can still play DVDs, as
long as you have a DVD drive in your PC or laptop.
Now as I mentioned previously, I don't have a DVD or a CD drive in my laptop. Now in order to
play a DVD once you've loaded it in, you will need to go to Windows Media Player. And you
can play DVDs using this. Now again, I can't demonstrate this to you because I don't have a
DVD drive. But if you do, I will have a little play around with that. So try inserting one of your
DVDs. And in general, what happens is that as soon as you load your DVD in, your laptop or PC
recognizes it. It will be listed as an additional drive in File Explorer.
So for example, underneath here, you can see right at the bottom, I have Windows C drive and
not much else. But if I was to put a DVD in, it's going to load it up. And it might be something
like the E drive or something like that. Similarly, once you go into Windows Media Player, you

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

will see that drive listed under here as well. So that's how you're going to be able to play that
DVD.
And if you're not particularly a big fan of Windows Media Player after you've been using it for a
while, then there are a number of other third party products available again in the Microsoft
Store for playing DVDs. So it's definitely worth having a little look through those if you're not
particularly happy with the functionality of Windows Media Player. That is it for Movies and
TV. In the next module, we're going to be doing our last exercise of the course. So I'll see you
over there.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 08

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. We've made it all
the way down to the final exercise in the course exercise eight. And this is a fairly
straightforward exercise.
In the Exercises Files Folder, you'll see that I have an mp3 file in there. Now this video only has
sound. It has some music, but it doesn't have any images and I've done that just to keep the file
size small so it doesn't take you a long while to download it. And what I want you to do is I want
you to set up Groove Music so that when it comes to videos, it's going to look in the Exercise
Files Folder, as well as in the Default folder.
And having done that, when you open up Groove Music, you should be able to see that file
sitting there in your songs list. And that is it. See how you go with that and I will see you in the
next module.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 13 – Sharing Files, Folders, and Printers

Video: Sharing Files

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module, I
want to talk to you a little bit about Sharing Files and Documents, and also Sharing Printers with
other people on your network.
So we're going to start by going through a demonstration of how you can share individual files
and folders with other people on your network. Then I'm going to show you how you can install
a printer and then share that printer with other people on your network. Now, more often than
not, there's going to be times when you're going to want to share files with other people.
Now, you can definitely share files with external friends and colleagues. But you can also share
files very easily with other members of your family, who are connected to your private network.
So I'm going to run through some options that you have when it comes to sharing files,
documents, images, and also sharing devices like printers. So I'm currently in my pictures folder.
And you can see here I have a number of different folders and also just some individual pictures.
And if I want to share these with other people, it's a very straightforward process from within
File Explorer.
So for example, if I select this picture, hold down Ctrl, and select the other three, if I want to
share these with somebody, I can just jump up to my ribbons, and you'll see the second ribbon
there is a Share ribbon. And this gives me all of the different options that I have when it comes to
sharing these files with other people. So let's click on this first button, the Share Button. It’s
telling me that I'm about to share four items. And then it says we need some more information,
tap to choose someone who you want to share to. So I can click here. And it's going to jump me
into my contacts list. And I can then scroll through, and I can select someone to share these files
with.
Alternatively, if I jump back to Share, I can choose to share with somebody nearby using
Bluetooth and Wi Fi. So if I have family member who has Bluetooth turned on maybe on their
phone or on their laptop, I can share files with that person that way. Alternatively, I can choose
one of these options listed underneath. Now I actually want to share these photos via an email.
So I'm going to select mail. And there we go, it automatically attaches those photos. I can type in
the name of the person that I want to share with, click on Send, and I've shared those pictures.
Now you'll notice also on the Share ribbon, we have an individual Email button. So again, that
will let me email the selected items to a particular person. I can choose to Zip. So maybe I have
lots of files selected, and they're quite a large file size. Before I share them, I might want to
reduce that file size by choosing to zip them. So again, if I click Zip, it’s going to create a zip
folder for me. And then when I go into that folder, those are my four image files saved into that
Zip folder.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now once I've got my files into my zipped folder, I could then choose to share this folder. Now
one thing to point out here is that these folders and files that you can see sitting here underneath
this PC Pictures, these are actually in my OneDrive. So if I expand OneDrive up here, you can
see I have my Pictures folder. And we basically seeing in there exactly what I'm seeing when I'm
clicked on Pictures underneath this PC. So effectively, these are all saved or backed up into
OneDrive.
Now the reason why that's important is because if I now want to share this particular folder, and
this time, I'm going to use a slightly different method, I'm going to use the right-click menu. You
can see the Share option there has that cloud icon so that means you're about to select a function
that's in OneDrive. And when I click that, it takes me to this little OneDrive send link box. And
what I can simply do is I can enter in the name of the person that I want to share this folder with,
I can add a message if I want to. And I can also choose how this link can be handled by the
person or people that I'm sending it to.
So currently, it says; “anyone with this link can edit”. And if I click here, I can modify some of
these settings. So currently, I'm sending this folder to Adam and I'm saying that I'm going to
allow him to edit this folder. So that might be that he can do things like move the files around,
delete the files, things like that. Now, if you don't want anyone touching anything in that folder,
you just want them to be able to view the folder, then you can come in here and untick this
option. I can also set an expiration date.
So essentially, this says; “you can view this folder up until a certain date, and at that date, this
link will expire, and the person's access to that folder will be removed”. And finally, I could also
set a password if I wanted to. Now I'm not going to in this case, I'm just going to say Apply to
those settings. And I have a couple of different options down here. So I can click on the Send
Button, and that's going to send an email to Adam with a link to this particular folder.
Alternatively, if I wanted to send this folder to maybe 50 different people, I don't really want to
have to go through adding 50 names into this little area up here. A much quicker way of doing
that would be just to copy the link. So OneDrive essentially creates a shareable link, I'm going to
say Copy. And I can then paste that link into an email and maybe send it out to a distribution list
that I have set up or a group.
Now one thing you'll notice once you've shared a file, and I'm actually going to switch views, so
this is a little bit more obvious, is that you can now see that the folder that I've shared now has
this little person icon next to it. So that's telling me that this is a shared folder. And what I could
do is I could jump back to my Share ribbon. And if I decide that I no longer want to give Adam
access to this folder, I have a Remove Access option in here. And you can see it says; “stop
sharing the selected items”. So let's remove Adam’s access, I'm going to say stop sharing. And
there we go.
So now let's walk through the process of adding a printer and sharing a printer with other people
on your network. So I've jumped in to Printers and Scanners. And all I've done is do a search for
Printers in the Search Bar. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the Add a

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Printer or Scanner button at the top. Windows 10 is going to scan my network for any printers.
And just so you understand my setup, I have a printer next to me that has Wi Fi enabled.
Now if you don't have a printer that has Wi Fi, then you may need to physically plug that printer
via USB or some other connection into your laptop or PC. But the actual process of setting it up
within Windows 10 is exactly the same. So you can see there, it's found one printer, so I'm going
to select it and click on Add Device. You can see that Windows 10 is now attempting to connect
to that device. Once it finds it, it's going to set up all the settings. And I can now see that it's
added my printer into the Printers and Scanners list underneath.
Now if I wanted to share this printer with maybe other members of my family who are on my
network, it's a very simple process. All you need to do is click on your installed printer, and click
on the Manage button. And there's various different things that you can do in here. So you can do
things like print a test page if you want to make sure that your printer is working correctly.
There's also a Troubleshooter in here as well. And you can modify some of your printing
preferences from here also. The one I'm interested in is Printer Properties. Now again, we have
lots of different tabs running across the top, but we're interested in Sharing. So I'm going to jump
across to the Sharing tab. Now you can see here it says; “if you share this printer, only users on
your network with a username and password for this computer can print to it. And the printer
will not be available when the computer sleeps”.
So I'm going to say Change Sharing Options. I'm going to say, Share this Printer. And I might
want to give it a different name. So I want to say Deb’s Printer - Canon, so everyone knows
which one we're talking about. I'm going to say Apply and then Okay. And now essentially
anybody else who is connected to my network, when they go into File Print or they invoke that
print dialog box in any way, they're going to be able to see that canon printer listed.
So hopefully that's giving you more of an idea as to how you can Share Files and Folders and
also set up a printer and share that with other people on your network. That's it for this module. I
will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 14 – Backing Up and Restoring Data

Video: Backing Up and Restoring Data

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be taking a look at Backing Up and Restoring Data. And there are a number of
tools available in Windows 10 to help you with this, and it's really going to be up to you to
determine which one best suits you.
So first of all, we're going to be looking at the principal backup facility called File History. And
then we're going to look at the Legacy Backup Solution, Backup and Restore (Windows 7). And
finally, I'm going to talk you through System Image Backups. Now the purpose of backing up is
really to safeguard your files from anything disastrous happening to your computer.
So essentially, when we're doing a backup, we're taking a copy of the files that we have on our
computer, and we are copying them to an external device. And the reason we do that is because
if you imagine that your laptop gets stolen, so maybe when you're out and about in the world
with your laptop, you lose your laptop, or someone steals it, if you don't have backup copies of
your files, then those files are going to be gone forever.
Similarly, if something happens to your device, so maybe you have a hard drive failure, or your
computer just stops working, you're also not going to be able to retrieve those files. So those are
a couple of different ways that you can lose all of your files. Now, when it comes to backing up
or implementing a backup regime, there's one common mistake that's very prevalent, but you
want to make sure that you avoid. And that is, backing up your files on the same device that
they're located.
So for example, if you have a laptop that has two different disks, you wouldn't backup files from
your C drive onto another disk on that laptop. Because again, if the whole laptop breaks, or you
lose your laptop, you're still gonna have lost all of those files. What you want to be doing is
copying them to an external device. That might be something like a DVD, it could be a USB
stick. Or if you do utilize cloud storage, like OneDrive, or maybe even something like Google
Drive, you're going to want to make sure that your files are in there.
Now me personally, I use OneDrive all the time so I know that my files are safe. If something
wants to happen to my laptop, I can simply log into OneDrive, and I can have access to those
files. However, in this example, just to show you have a different way of doing things, I'm going
to be using a USB memory stick in order to show you the process of backing up and restoring.
So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to plug in my memory stick into the USB port on
my laptop. And you can see there in the bottom corner, it recognize my USB drive, and it's
assigned it to drive D. And if I open up File Explorer, and scroll down, you will see right at the
bottom there it says USB drive D. There's currently nothing on it because I haven't copied any
files to it yet.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now when it comes to backing up, you can really determine how frequently you want to back up
your system files, or just the files that you use every day. You may decide that you want to do
that on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. But again, that's something for you to
determine. The first method I'm going to show you is something called File History. So what I'm
going to do is I'm going to jump straight in to File History settings.
Now again, it did used to be called File History. But you'll see now the best match is Backup
Settings. So that's the one we want to select. And it's jumped me straight to the Backup Page.
And you can see currently, it says; “Backup using File History, backup your files to another
drive and restore them if the originals are lost, damaged or deleted”. Now currently, I have that
setting turned off. I'm going to come back to this in a moment and turn it on. But what I want to
do first of all is just jump into More Options. So you can see at the top here it's telling me the
size of the backups. So this is the size of the files currently located on my PC.
Underneath, it's recognized my Removable Disk so my USB drive, and it's telling me how much
space I have on that. So 58.5 gig, and it's telling me backup is disabled. So now we have this
backup My Files area and this is where you can select the frequency. So what essentially this will
do is it will look for any changes and saved change versions of files. So essentially, it's going to
keep multiple older versions of files so you can then go back to any older versions that you have.
And you can see all the choices that you have there in the dropdown. Now what you choose to
select in here will very much depend on the kind of work that you do.
Now, I would say if you don't make changes to files very often, then there's probably not really
too much point in having it save every hour, you would probably be more suited to setting this
option at daily. However, if you're doing a lot of work, and maybe you're making constant
changes to a small number of files, and you want to be able to go back to them, then you're
probably going to want to set this to one of these options towards the top, so maybe every 10
minutes, every 15 minutes, so on and so forth.
The second option here is “Keep my Backups for How Long”. So you can essentially put a time
restriction on how long your backups are kept for. So you can choose from here one month, three
months, six months, or there's an option in here for until space is needed. Now, I tend to keep
mine set to Forever, which is the default setting. And if I need more space than I get more space.
Now let's look at the list of the folders that it's backing up. And you can see here, it's basically a
list of my User folders. So you can see here, it's backing up deb_a, deb_a OneDrive, searches,
documents, pictures, downloads, so on and so forth. So pretty much everywhere where I'm likely
to save files, it's currently backing up.
Now if you wanted to add a folder from somewhere else, you can definitely do that you have an
Add a Folder button at the top. And you can just go in and select which folder you want it to also
backup. And if we scroll down, you'll see that you also have the option to Exclude Folders as
well. So for example, currently, mine is backing up the Downloads folder. Now I don't tend to
need to have my Download folder backed up because normally if I download something, I then
pretty much immediately move it somewhere else. So whether it's a picture that I've downloaded,

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

that will get moved to the pictures folder, or whatever it might be, I normally take it out of
downloads.
So for this, I'm going to say Add a Folder. And I'm going to say I want to exclude the Downloads
folder. And finally, this option that we have at the bottom, Backup to a Different Drive. It says;
“you'll need to stop using your current backup drive before you add a new one. This won't delete
any files from your current backup drive”. So essentially, if you find out that the device that
you're backing up to whether that's an external drive, USB stick or DVD, there will come a point
where that drive is going to fill up. So you're probably going to want to use another DVD or
another USB memory stick to continue backing up your files.
And what you need to make sure you do is that you come into here and you say; “stop using
drive before you switch to the new drive”. Now I'm just about ready to start backing up to my
USB memory stick. But just before I do, I'm just going to quickly jump into Advanced Settings.
And what I want to do in here is just to make sure that File History is happy with the drive that
I've selected. And you can see here that it's showing my removable disk. So this is my USB
memory stick essentially. And what you might find is that when you come into here, particularly
if this is the first time that you're using this, you'll find that File History is turned off like that.
So what you need to make sure you do is come in here and just click turn on. So essentially, File
History is now turned on. And it's going to be running those backups regularly depending on the
settings that I've set. What I'm now going to do is to accidentally delete a file and then show you
how to restore it.
So I've just jumped across to my Videos folder on my C drive. And you can see that I have a few
different videos in there. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete a couple of these, and
I'm going to show you how to restore them. So I'm going to delete this video of the guitarist and
then these two that I have of the galaxy. And I'm just going to right-click and select Delete. So
now, if I want to restore those from my backup file, I’ll jump down to the search menu and just
type in Restore. And you can see the option there, Restore your files with File History. So now I
can jump into that Videos folder.
There are the backup files, I can select guitarist and the two that I deleted. And all I need to do is
click on the big green Restore button and you'll notice that it says it's going to restore those files
to their original location. And there we go, File Explorer has popped open. It's in the Videos
folder, and there are those files restored from my backup.
Let's now look at the Legacy Backup and Restore options. So I'm going to jump into Control
Panel. One of the options we have in here is Backup and Restore (Windows 7). So this
essentially can be used to back and restore instead of File History. So what I want to do is go into
Setup Backup. So you can see here it's asking me to select where I want to save my backup. Now
you might have multiple things listed in here, depending on what you have plugged into your
computer. The only external drive or USB memory stick I have plugged in is this one just here.
So I'm going to select it, and also know that I have an option to save on a network.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

Now on this occasion, I'm not going to do that I'm going to stick with my memory stick, and I'm
going to click on Next. Now here, it's asking what do you want to backup? So the default option
or the recommended option is Let Windows choose. So essentially, with this option, Windows
will backup data files saved in libraries on the desktop, and in default windows folders, these
items will be backed up on a regular schedule.
The second option you have is to choose them yourself. So you can go in and select libraries and
folders. And you can also select whether to include a system image in the backup. So if you go
for the Let me choose option and click on Next, you can see here, it's going to list out everything
that I have on my PC. And I can go through and I can select exactly which folders I want to
include in the backup. So let's roll through and I'm going to expand users, I'm going to expand
my folder. And this time, I'm just going to backup that Downloads folder. And you can see
underneath we have an option for include a system image of the drives.
Now a system image is essentially a copy of your operating system, the Windows operating
system, and all the files required to make that work. I’m going to talk about that a little more at
the end of this module. Now one thing I'll point out is that you can see for me, this is grayed out.
And that's because the system image can't be backed up to the type of memory stick that I'm
using. But for the time being, I'm just going to select this Downloads folder, and I'm going to
click on Next.
Now I get a chance to review my Backup Settings. So it's saying backup location is the D drive.
It's showing me which folders I'm backing up. And then we have the schedule at the bottom. So
currently, it's going to backup every Sunday at 7pm. And if I want to change that, I can click on
Change schedule. And I might want to say every Monday at 10pm. Click on Ok. And now I'm
going to say Save Settings and run backup.
So I’ve just jumped back to that Backup and Restore (Windows 7) Legacy option in Control
Panel. And I want to just further that train of thought on backing up or creating system images.
As I mentioned, the system image basically takes a copy of all of your operating system files.
And the reason why that's useful is if anything was to happen to your operating system, you
could essentially re-install Windows 10 from your backup system files.
So in order to do that, or create a system image, you would jump into here and you have an
option here Create a System Image. It's then gonna ask you where you want to backup. And the
first option here for me is on a hard disk and it's got my USB drive selected. Now as I mentioned
before, if I was doing a system backup right now, I wouldn't be able to use this particular
memory stick because it's not formatted correctly for the Windows operating system to be
backed up to. But you'll see that I also have a couple of other options on one or more DVDs or to
a network location.
So all you need to do is to select your options, click on next and work your way through that
wizard to create your own system image. Now you would normally use system image in
conjunction with the backup and restore of individual files if something absolutely terrible
happened to your system. You'd want to restore your system files and then you'd want to restore
your User files and data from File History. I would advise you to take a system image when you

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Windows 10 for Beginners

have Windows 10 working how you want, keep it safe, run your backups daily. And if the worst
does happen, you'd be able to restore your system image and then recover your files.
Now I'm not going to go through the whole process of creating a system image now, but I do
suggest you take one and then from time to time it's a good idea to take another one to make sure
that it's kept up to date. That's it for this module, I will see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Video: System and Administration

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this module,
we're going to be taking a look at a few topics related to System Administration. Now one or two
of them are about managing the system. And one or two are about fixing problems that might
occur or being aware of ways to improve the performance of your device.
So we're going to start out by taking a look at User Account Control. I'm going to walk you
through Task Manager, I'm going to show you some options you have in Disk Management.
We're going to take a look at Disk Cleanup. And finally, I'm going to show you how
Defragmentation works. So let's start out with User Account Control.
Now there are all kinds of dangers that exist which might at some point impair your device. One
of the ways is that a piece of software might do some damage, it might install another piece of
software, or it might change some settings. Now there are some features in Windows 10 that
restrict this happening, and that comes under User Account Control. So I'm going to jump down
to my search bar and type in User Account Control. And the best match there is in Control Panel,
Change User Account Control settings.
And you can see here it says; “User Account Control helps prevent potentially harmful programs
from making changes to your computer”. And then we have the sliding scale where we can
specify if we want the system to never notify us of any changes, or always notify us of changes.
And you can specify which level of change you're willing to accept without any kind of
confirmation.
So if I give you a little example of this, so there might be a piece of software that you use every
single day. So let's say something like a VPN. Maybe you work from home, and you have to
connect to your work network every day using a VPN. Now when you double click on that VPN
icon to connect to your work network, it might be that the User Account Control kicks in, and it
warns you that you're about to do something which could potentially damage your network. And
whilst I'm sure that that wouldn't happen with a simple connection to your work network, the
system has recognized that you are connecting to an external source where potential changes to
your computer may occur.
That is the kind of situation where User Account Control will kick in. And you'll be asked to say
yes, this is fine, or no, I don't want to do this anymore. And that all relies on the setting that you
have in here. You can see here we have four different levels. And currently, mine is set at level
three. Now we'll say that the level of protection provided at levels two and three is pretty similar,
but level three is the default. So if you're not sure, I would recommend that you do stick with this
default setting.
So what happens here is that Windows 10 is basically going to notify me when any application
tries to make a change to my computer or my computer files. But it's not going to notify me
when I make changes. So if I'm in File Explorer, and I'm deleting system files, it's not going to

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

say to me; “No, you shouldn't be doing that”. But if it recognizes that an outside source is trying
to modify those important files, then it will prompt.
Now the most extreme setting that you have in here is this top one. And you can see here it says;
“always notify me when applications try to install software or make changes to my computer, or
I make a change to Windows settings”.
Now this is quite harsh, because there's often times when you're going to want to change things
in your windows settings. And there's often times where you want to download a new application
onto your PC, and you really don't want to be notified every time you do that. So for the time
being, I'm going to keep mine at level three.
Now another tool that you have available in Windows 10 that's really helpful when it comes to
managing your system is the Task Manager. And there's a couple of different ways that you can
get to Task Manager. You can press Control Alt Delete on your PC, and you'll see an option for
Task Manager. But for me, the easiest way to access it is going down to my Status bar, right-
clicking my mouse, and you'll see we have an option here called Task Manager.
Now if you've used an earlier version of Windows, then you're probably very familiar with this.
We've got a number of tabs running across the top which shows various different aspects of our
system, and in particular, what's going on on our system right now. So I'm currently clicked on
Processes and this is showing me a live snapshot of everything that I currently have running on
my PC.
So you can see here, the top one there that's taking the most memory. And this is always the top
one for me is the software that I'm using to record this tutorial on. You can see there Google
Chrome is running, I have five windows open, I have PowerPoint running, I've got the Task
Manager itself running. And then this is another part of my recording software. And I can see
there how much CPU each is using how much memory, disk, network and GPU. It's also
showing me the power usage here as well. So this is a good thing to come into.
If you find that your PC is running really slow, or it keeps hanging, it's definitely worth jumping
in here and just taking a look at the different processes that you're currently running, and which
ones are using the most memory and CPU. Now probably the main reason that people tend to
jump into Task Manager is when they have an application that somehow got itself stuck. So I'm
sure we've all been in that situation, maybe we've been working away on something particularly
memory intensive, maybe an extremely large Excel spreadsheet. And all of a sudden, you find
that that spreadsheet appears to have hung. And there's not really anything you can do, you click
around the spreadsheet, you can't close it down, you're kind of stuck.
So this is where you would jump into Task Manager. And you can essentially kill off the
application from here. Now, I will say that doing this is quite a harsh way of closing down an
application. But sometimes if an application truly has got itself stuck, there isn't really any
alternative. So all you would need to do is come into here, and let's say it was PowerPoint that
was hung, I would click on the PowerPoint process. And then right down in the bottom corner, I
have an End Task option. And that's just going to kill it off, close it down. And hopefully then it

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Windows 10 for Beginners

frees up your system. Now I'm not going to do this because I need PowerPoint running. But
hopefully that gives you an idea of how you would do that.
Now another interesting to have in here is the Startup tab. So this lists processes and apps that
start up when you start Windows 10. So if you find that it's taking a long time to start up your PC
or laptop, or maybe things are automatically starting that you don't particularly need or want,
then you can disable them from here. Now in general, I don't like to have too many things
starting up when I start up my PC. And you can see I've disabled a couple of these, but I do have
a few enabled. For example, Microsoft OneDrive, I like that to start up automatically as soon as I
log into my PC. Just remember with any of these, if you want to toggle between enabled and
disabled, just right-click, and you can either select Enable or Disable.
Now many aspects of a Windows 10 system need administration from time to time. Now
sometimes this requires more of an advanced knowledge of Windows. But the ones we're going
to look at are ones you're most likely to need to use throughout your lifetime of using Windows.
And the first thing I'm going to show you is the Disk Management utility. So what this little
utility does is it basically looks at my hard drive, and it tells me what's going on on this hard
drive.
Now most hard drives that you’ll come across are partitioned or separated into different disks.
And you can see that mine is separated into three different parts. If I click on this first part just
here, you'll see that it highlights in the list above. So this is Disk 0 partition 1, I then have
Windows C, this is the largest partition. So this contains all of my system files. And then finally
we have Disk 0 partition 4.
Now each of these partitions are also referred to as logical volumes, and each of them occupies a
certain amount of space. Now as I said, some of them don't take up too much space. This first
partition 260 meg, and this last one 518. But this middle one Windows C Drive is 953.9 gig. So
this is the big one. And one thing that's good about this window is that you can actually see how
much free space you have left on your particular partition or particular disk.
So if I click on that C drive Windows, you can see here, I have 860 gigs worth of free space.
90% of my C drive is free. So for me, that's a good thing. It doesn't look like I'm going to run out
of disk space anytime soon. Now I will say I've mentioned this before, I have a very new laptop
that I purchased two months ago. And because I have the majority of my files stored away in the
cloud, I'm not storing them on the hard drive of my laptop. So that is kind of how I managed to
keep the space that I'm using fairly low.
So if you are having speed issues with your PC or things have just got a little bit sluggish, it's
definitely worth jumping into Disk Management and checking how much space you have left on
your C drive. If you find that you don't have a great deal of space left, you're probably going to
want to start to clear some space out. And that is what I'm going to move on to discussing now,
we're going to talk about Disk Cleanup utilities.
So I'm going to jump down to Search and I'm going to type in Disk Cleanup. And there we go,
it's an app. Now automatically mine has selected my C drive because I only have one drive on

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Windows 10 for Beginners

this laptop. Now sometimes PCs will have a C drive and a D drive. So if that's you, then you will
get the option to select which drive you're interested in cleaning up. And what it's basically done
when I've started this up is it's done a quick scan of my disk, and it's given me some things that I
can safely delete to free up some space. So Downloaded Program Files, well that is zero bytes. I
haven't downloaded anything. But it's telling me that I could delete that if I wanted to.
Temporary internet files, now those are created all the time when you're browsing around and
doing various different things. So they're normally absolutely fine to get rid of as well, they're
not going to cause any damage by deleting them. There's some other options in here, which aren't
selected. But for example, something like the Recycle Bin, that's taking up 48.6 gig of space on
my hard drive currently. Now remember, Recycle Bin is where files that you've deleted go to. So
if I wanted to, I could say to myself, yep, I don't want anything in the recycle bin. And I could
select that as well.
I might not be interested in keeping anything that I've got in my Downloads folder either. So I
could select that to free up some more space. Once I've selected my options, if I then click on
Ok, it's going to remove those options and hopefully free up lots of space.
Now the final thing I want to speak about in this module is Defragmentation. Now over a period
of time, files on your drive can get broken into fragments. And these can really slow down your
system. So let's open the Defragmentation utility. And there we go, Defragment and Optimize
Drives. Again, this is an app and it says here; “you can optimize your drives to help your
computer run more efficiently, or analyze them to find out if they need to be optimized. Only
drives on or connected to your computer are shown”. And then below, I have my C drive shown
there.
Now I have my drive set to be automatically optimized. And you can see underneath it says that
my optimization is on. And it's going to run that optimization weekly. Now because I do that on
a regular basis, it's telling me when this was last run, and it's telling me that my system is now
okay. So this is something I would definitely turn on if you don't have it turned on already. And
if you want to change the frequency, if you click on Change Settings, you can choose when
exactly you want that optimization to run. And of course, if you just want to manually run a
quick optimized drives, you can do that simply by clicking on the Optimize button.
So that is it on those system admin tools that are really going to help you manage cleanup and
optimize your system so that it runs efficiently and smoothly. That is the final module of this
section and in fact, the final working module of this course. In the final section, we’re just going
to close off this course, and I'm going to say my goodbyes, so please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 15 – Additional Useful Apps

Video: Snipping Tools and Sticky Notes

Deborah: Hello everyone, and welcome back to this course on Windows 10. In this section, I
really want to just tie up some loose ends with regards to a couple of apps that we haven't
covered yet, but I think are super useful for most people's day to day work.
So we're going to start out by going through the Snipping Tool or Snip and Sketch as it's now
called. And then I'm going to show you something called Sticky Notes. So let's start out with the
Snipping Utility.
If you're not sure what it is, well, it's kind of a really nice way of being able to take screenshots
and insert them into other applications or the documents. And the cool thing about the Snipping
Tool is that you aren't just stuck with taking a shot of the entire screen, you can specify which
regions you want to take a screenshot of. So let's open up the Snipping Tool. Now I will say that
for a few years, it has been called the Snipping Tool. So I'm just going to search for it here. And
you'll see it still listed at the top there. So it's still available. So let's click to open.
Now the first thing you'll see here is that it says Snipping Tool is moving. In a future update,
Snipping Tool will be moving to a new home. So essentially, Snipping Tool is being transitioned
over to a tool called Snip and Sketch. But currently, at least when I'm writing this course, we
have both available in Windows 10. So I'll briefly show you how the Snipping Tool works, then
we'll jump into Snip and Sketch.
Now the first thing you really need to specify before you start using the Snipping Tool is the
Mode. So let's click the dropdown, you have a number of different modes that you can choose in
order to specify how you want to snip. So you can do a Free-form Snip, a Rectangular snip,
which is what I have it set to, Window Snap, or Full-screen Snip. So it really depends what
you're trying to capture. So let's keep it on Rectangular Snip for the time being, and I'm going to
show you an example of that.
Now the important thing to note here is that we have this little free moving window that we can
drag and place wherever we like on the screen. But what you need to have is the item that you
want to snip directly underneath this Snipping Tool. So I've navigated to this picture of a horse
on the pexels.com website. And I've then placed that Snipping Tool window immediately on top
of that picture. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to select New for new snip, and you can
see immediately the entire screen kind of ghosts out and my cursor changes to that of a crosshair.
Now because I have Rectangular Snip selected, it means that when I click and drag, it’s going to
be in a rectangle shape. So I'm going to click and I'm going to drag around this image of the
horse and let go. And it essentially takes a snip or it captures that image for me. And I can then
go in and I can save that as a PNG file. And I can save that anywhere I like. So for this example,
I'm just going to put it on the desktop. And I'm going to say “Horse” and click on Save.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Now it's worth noting that once you do capture an image within the Snipping Tool, you don't
have to save it. You can, if you want to, immediately copy and paste that somewhere else. So
maybe I want to paste this image into a Word document. On my toolbar, just here, I have a copy
option. I can then jump across to Word. And I can do a regular Word paste so Ctrl V, or I can
select paste and it pastes that image directly in. So it's a really nice way of being able to capture
items on the screen.
Now for something like this horse picture, this is from a website where I could have simply just
selected free download, and it would have taken all that hard work out of it for me and just
downloaded the image. But there are occasions when Snipping Tool is particularly useful. So if I
jump across to this other window that I have open, you can see here this is just a Google search
window where I'm looking for instructions on how to share a printer in Windows 10. And the
first result there pretty much gives me exactly what I want.
So I guess I could highlight this and copy and paste it elsewhere if I needed those instructions,
but another way that I could do that would be to utilize the Snipping Tool. So if I click on the
New button again, I can then drag over these instructions, Let go, and I've now captured
instructions and I can do exactly the same thing; save this off as an image file, or I can click
Copy, jump into that Word document again, and this time, I'm going to do Ctrl V to paste those
in.
Now, this is also particularly useful if you have things like error messages on your screen. So if
you're at work and you're trying to do something on your system, and you get one of those little
annoying pop up error messages, it might be that you want to send that error message to tech
support or an IT help desk. This Snipping Tool is really useful for that as well, because you can
just jump on there, take a snip, send it to the Help Desk as an image, and they can see exactly
what you're getting on your screen. So those are some of the instances where I've utilized the
Snipping Tool.
Now just jumping back to those modes that we have up here, you can see all these different
options that we have. So I could choose to do a Full-screen Snip. And there we go, I don't have
to select anything, the Snipping Tool is literally just captured my entire screen. And then again, I
can go up, I can save it, I can copy it, and I can even email this if I wanted to. So I can send this
snip in an email as an attachment.
You'll also notice that within the Snipping Tool, you have some other features. So if you want to
draw on your snip, you can. So I'm going to select the highlighter here, I'm just going to
highlight this piece at the top, I'm not very good at doing this at all. And I have a pen tool as
well. So I might want to circle something to bring someone's attention to that particular point.
Now I was doing that with a mouse so it's not particularly very neat. But I'm sure if you've got
something like a pen or tablet, that's going to be a lot neater, but just remember, you have those
options from within the Snipping Tool.
Now let's take a look at Snip and Sketch as I said is similar and is going to be the replacement for
Snipping Tool in the future. Now you can see that underneath Apps, we have Snip and Sketch,
let's open it. It's not too dissimilar to the Snipping Tool that we were looking at previously, it

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

works in pretty much the same way. We can click the dropdown, I can choose to Snip now, Snip
in 3 seconds, or Snip in 10 seconds.
Now you might think why would I need something like Snip in 3 seconds or Snip in 10 seconds?
Well, this is actually really useful for someone like me who puts together a lot of technical user
guides. So I'm going to jump across to Excel for one moment just to demonstrate why this option
can be helpful. So if I'm putting together a user guide, and I want to talk somebody through how
to do something, it might be that I want to take a screenshot of a particular menu. So I'm just
going to put a number into here. And it might be that I want to right-click and show them all of
the options in this menu.
But as soon as I click away from this menu to select my Snipping Tool, that menu disappears.
And that is where this delay comes in useful. So I'm going to say Snip in 3 seconds. And that
gives me three seconds to jump across and bring up that menu. Then the Snipping Tool kicks in
after three seconds, and I can now take a snip of that menu. So that is kind of the situation where
you might use that delay option. Then you have fairly similar things in here. So you can choose
to Save this as an image file. You have your options to Copy if you want to paste into another
document. And you also have some Sharing Options in there as well.
Then in the middle, we have Editing Utilities. So if I select Crop, I can make this little bit neater
and just crop those edges. I also have my Pen Utilities and Highlighter and also an Arrays. Now
if I was just to click on the New Button as opposed to clicking that dropdown, this is going to
give me the different options I have with regards to the region that I'm snipping. So the first
option here is that Rectangular Snip, I have Free-form, Window, and Full-screen Snips. So pretty
much the same options that we had in the Snipping Tool.
And as always, with many of these apps, if you click on those three dots on the end, you have
some additional options. And this is also where you'll find your settings for Snip and Sketch. For
example, if you want to quickly invoke Snip and Sketch, you can set up the Print Screen button
on your keyboard so that opens this application. So that's quite a nice one to utilize if you do a lot
of snipping.
Now the final app that I want to show you here is something called Sticky Notes. So let's jump
straight down to the Search Bar and type in Sticky Notes. There we go. Again, it's an app. Now
Sticky Notes are kind of like electronic post-it notes. And they're a way for you to simply and
very visually take a small note, add it to your desktop, and be able to refer back to those notes.
For example, in my old office where I used to work, we had a door which led out onto the street,
which had a very complicated access number that I could never remember.
So, I would have a little sticky note that said door number. And that became a little sticky note
on my desktop. You have some basic formatting options for your Sticky Notes as well. So if you
need to make anything bold, you can definitely do that. Italics, underline, strike through, you can
add bullet points. And you can also add images into your Sticky Notes. Now each sticky note
that you create will appear in this sticky note list and you have a search facility up here for you to
find a particular sticky note.

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Windows 10 for Beginners

And as always, we have those three dots at the top. And you can do things like change the color
of your sticky note. So I'm going to move this over to the side of my screen. I'm also going to
resize it down so it's quite small in the corner there. And when I close that Sticky Notes panel,
you can see that that Sticky Note remains there and it will remain there until I decide to delete it.
So if you wanted to, you could have lots and lots of different Sticky Notes on your desktop
background. So a very simple but a very useful little app. That's it for this module. Please join
me in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2020 Simon Sez IT, INC. All Rights Reserved.

Windows 10 for Beginners

Section 16 – Closing

Video: Additional Topics and Closing

Deborah: Hi guys, and welcome to the final section of this course. First of all a huge
congratulations for making your way through all of the modules and also all of the exercises. I've
aimed to cover as many topics related to Windows 10 as I can, but there are some things that I
haven't covered.
So we looked at a few applications and store apps, but we've not looked at any of them in any
great amount of detail. So I would encourage you to really get familiar with your Windows 10
system and start looking at some of these apps in more detail. And as always, there are plenty of
sources of information available online in particular on the Microsoft support site that can help
you through some of the more complex details of these applications and desktop programs.
We've also not covered many of the more technical aspects of Windows 10, which is an
absolutely massive topic. We've dipped our toe into Networking. But Networking in general is a
huge, big and complex topic to cover. So for example, if you need to do something like connect
multiple Windows devices together, and share information, again, there is a lot of information
available online for you to reference.
But hopefully we've covered enough in this course to get you started and get you feeling more
comfortable with your Windows 10 system. I really hope you've enjoyed this course as much as
I've enjoyed preparing it and presenting it to you. Once again, my name is Deb and I hope to see
you again at some point in the future.

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