- [Instructor] It's very common to run
multiple applications at the same time
and jump back and forth between them.
This is known as multitasking.
So to start, I have three applications running,
but it may be a little hard to see what's here
because I've just got a bunch of windows
piled on top of each other.
Well, first, whichever application window is on the top
is the currently active application.
You probably already know that
you can change which window is active
just by clicking on another window, like this.
But sometimes, you can't see a window to click on it
because another window is blocking it.
So what if I moved this window over here?
Now, I can't see those other windows,
so how do I switch between those applications?
Well, every application that is currently running
should appear in the taskbar.
Even if the application has not been pinned to the taskbar,
it will appear there when the application is running,
and I can use these icons in the taskbar
to switch between which one is active.
In fact, you can tell which one is active here
because that's the icon that has that highlight on it.
So in general, clicking on an icon in the taskbar
launches that application.
But if that application is already running,
it just makes that the active window.
So this is multitasking.
I have several applications open
and I can quickly switch between them.
Now, if you have more than one window open
in an application, the taskbar will behave
a little bit differently.
So let me switch back over to Edge,
and I want to open a second window.
To do that, I'll click this button with three dots
near the top right corner to open this menu,
then I'll choose New Window,
and now I have two separate windows open
in this application.
With that set, I'm going to switch back over
to another application.
And then I want to go back to the application
with two windows.
When I point at that icon in the taskbar,
it shows me all of the windows
that are open in that application,
and then I can click on the one that I want to be active,
and that moves to the top of the stack.
There's also a great way to switch between applications
using a keyboard command.
This keyboard command is known as Alt tab.
So what I'm going to do is hold the Alt key on my keyboard
and I'm going to keep holding it.
I'm not going to let go until I tell you.
While I'm holding the Alt key, I'll press the Tab key.
You can see all of the windows that are currently open
and you can keep pressing Tab
until you select the window that you want to be active,
and then you can let go of the Alt key
and that window moves to the top of the stack.
So it takes a moment to describe it,
but when you actually use it, it's really quick,
just Alt Tab to the window that you want and let go.
And I want to finish up by looking at some features
that can make it easy to get your windows organized
on the screen.
Now, we already know that you can maximize a window
just by clicking this box button in the top right corner,
and that moves it to pretty much a full screen view.
And you can click that button again,
and it goes back to a normal sized window.
Another way to do this is to move that window around
and then just move it up
and push it against the top edge of the screen and let go,
and that will switch it to the maximized view.
And you can grab it near the edge
and drag it back down to switch it back to a window.
Now, you can also use this snapping feature
to tile windows side-by-side.
So I could grab a window, drag it,
and push it against the left edge of the screen and let go,
and now it fills the left half of the screen.
And on the right half of the screen,
I just need to choose the window
that I want to fill that other half,
and now I have a nice split screen view.
It's real easy to get out of that split screen view.
I can just drag those windows back down
to a regular sized window.
Now, another option is to just point at
that maximize button on a window,
and you see these preset window layouts
that you can snap to.
This is called Snap Assist.
So, if I wanted this window on the left side
of a split screen view, I could click right here.
And you might want to play around with
these different views, but let's go to the
four-window split and I want this window to be
in the bottom right quadrant, so I'm going to select that.
Then over in this quadrant, I'll select the window
that I want to fill that.
Over here, I'll select a window here,
and I'll select a window for this quadrant.
So just a really quick way to arrange multiple windows
on the screen so you can see them all.
And you can always grab a window
and just drag it back towards the middle
to switch it back to a regular window size.
So now you've got the core functionality of
multitasking in Windows,
so you can enjoy the freedom of
running several applications at the same time.