- [Instructor] In this course, I've said many times that
you can set up your user account to sign in with
either a Microsoft Online account
or a basic account with just a name and password.
You set that when you start up the computer
for the first time or when you create a user account.
Now, I want to talk about what you can do
if you change your mind about
which type of account you want to use to sign into Windows.
To see that, we'll start by going into Settings.
So in the Start menu, I'll open Settings.
On the left, we'll go to the Accounts category.
And up at the top, you can see I have my email address,
which tells me I sign into Windows
with a Microsoft Online account.
In fact, most users setting up a new Windows 11 computer
will be required to sign in with a Microsoft Online account
when they set up the computer.
I want to go to this Your Info subsection.
And if you do sign in with a Microsoft account,
there's an option here to switch to sign in
with a local account instead.
A local account is just the username and password
that is not linked to online services from Microsoft.
So we can click on that and go through the process.
This all looks good, so I'll click Next.
I'll need to put in my pin code or my password.
And now, I want to set up the username and password
that I'll use to sign into the computer in the future.
Now, I don't want to keep using this abbreviation.
I'm going to put in my full name there.
Then, I need to put in the password that I want to use
since I'll no longer be using the password
associated with my online account.
And you do have to put in a password hint.
This is in case you ever forget your password,
it can give you this hint that will help you remember it.
For now, I'm just going to type something in there
so we can go through the process.
Then we'll click Next, but I'm going to see
something interesting here when I click Next.
It's not going to let me use my name
as I've written it here
because it's already set up the existing account
using that name and it can get confused.
But fortunately, I have a few different forms of my name.
So I could use the long version of my name,
or maybe I could just use my first two initials.
But if you run into this, you'll just have to change
the format of your name in some way
so you can go through the rest of this setup.
But once you've got that set, you can click Next.
And everything looks right,
so I'll choose Sign Out and Finish.
So it will need to sign you out of
your user account, make that change.
You'll land back here on the sign in screen.
And now, I can sign into this account.
It's the same account, I'm just going to sign in differently.
Now, it's still using the same pin code I had before,
but the main password is different whenever I need that.
And now, I'm all signed in,
and all of my settings and all of my files are still here.
You may notice that my desktop background
is still set how I wanted it.
Now, if I go over to File Explorer
and go to maybe my Documents folder,
all of my files are exactly where I left them.
However, if I go back to Settings,
so I'll go to the Start menu and click on Settings,
and we'll go back to Accounts over on the left.
Now up at the top, you can see it says Local Account.
My Microsoft account is no longer linked to
my user account on this computer.
However, be aware, if you used OneDrive before,
it will still be signed into OneDrive
after making this switch.
We can check that by going down to the taskbar.
You might see an icon for OneDrive here
or you might need to click this arrow here,
then you can click OneDrive here.
And of course, this is only going to be there
if you had OneDrive set up.
So I can go to Help and Settings, then to Settings.
And if I go to this Account tab,
I can see that it is still signed into
the same account that it was signed in
before I made that switch for my user account.
But if I wanted to, I could click Unlink This PC
to remove my OneDrive account from this computer.
I'm not going to do that.
For now, I'm just going to cancel that.
And of course, you can do this the other way, too.
If you sign into your computer
with a standard local account,
with just a username and a password,
you could come here and you could click Your Info
and you've got the option here to switch it to sign in
with a Microsoft Online account instead.
You can click that and then you can sign in
with an existing Microsoft Online account,
or you can click Create One
if you need to make a new online account.
Then you can go through the rest of this process
and that will switch your user account on Windows
and will link it to that Microsoft Online account.
Switching the type of user account you use for your computer
is not a normal everyday thing,
but as you learn more about what Windows is capable of
and how it connects to Cloud services
in several applications, you may find that you want to
change your mind about the type of user account
that you use to sign into Windows.