start menu

The Start Menu is one of the most noticeable changes with Windows 10 vs previous versions. It took a few versions – mostly merging Windows 7 and Windows 8 into a working start menu! Another recent small improvement is good know about as it adds some detailed information that went missing (a common comment I have about the Mac OS is that all makes sense if you know how a Mac works, but starting fresh a number of icons and settings make no sense).

One the start menu, note the far left column is just icons. These are great for keeping the features handy  while minimizing space. 

If you are not certain what the icons represent, click the 3-line icon at the top. The left strip expands to show the full names of each feature (see the April 5, 2018 post on customizing what features are in the left strip).

Troy @ TLC

Customizing the Operating System is something that we do to every computer at TLC Creative Services. It assures any computer our team uses is consistent with the same software, and the same way of finding things. Back in late 2015 and again in early 2016 I had posts showing our Windows 10 Start menu setup. Here is our final evolution of the Start Menu we have rolled out on all TLC Creative (Windows) computers:

1. The default options hide too many of the commonly needed button on the left column. In the Windows 10 Settings dialog we assure every TLC Creative computer has: documents, downloads, music, pictures, video, network, file explorer, settings, and power.
2. The top group added to our computers is Office 2016 (Office 365 Subscription), and the order of icons is the same on all computers: Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, Word, Excel, Skype for Business.
3. Our next most used set of applications is the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. There is a bit a variation of apps included depending on the designers expertise. For me it is: Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, Media Encoder, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat.
4. No one web browser works for everything in today’s web-based world, so we have a collection of browsers installed: Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer.
5. Media is a big part of our world, so having lots of media players organized and available makes our work a bit faster: Groove, iTunes, Microsoft Movies & TV, Microsoft Photo, Quicktime, Spotify (half our team has this, the other half Pandora).
6. The Utilities group helps uncover a number of Microsoft dialogs and apps that have become buried in the newer OS: File Explorer, Windows Defender, My Computer, Calculator, NXPowerlite, Control Panel, Run, Task Manager, Settings, Command Prompt.
7. And the Misc. Apps group is for everything else, it also is one group that varies on each team member’s computer. My Misc Apps group has: SyncBack Pro, Hightail, Camtasia, QuickBooks, SnagIt, eWallet, Filezilla, Microsoft Store.

Troy @ TLC