equivalent of a double-click.
Tap and drag to move an item across the screen.
Learning how to swipe with your fingers on the screen helps too:
Swipe right to left (in from the right side of your screen to the left) to open notifications and the calendar.
Swipe left (in from the left side) to view the widgets.
As you browse around Windows 11, notice how almost everything is a lot more touch-friendly than in Windows 10. I appreciate the new Settings app in Windows 11. It's simpler and better for both touch and mouse than Settings in Windows 10. Also, the highly improved File Explorer (see Figure 1-6) makes navigating files and folders much easier on a tablet.
FIGURE 1-6: File Explorer in Windows 11 works much better on touchscreens.
Shut Down, Sleep, Restart, Sign Out, Lock, Sleep
If you go away from your Windows 11 laptop, tablet, or computer for a long time, shut it down, meaning it is turned off completely and doesn’t use energy. You restart it by simply pressing the Power button.
If you’re taking a break for an hour or so, put your device to sleep. This mode turns off the display but keeps your computer awake and uses little energy. Also, your work is kept the way it was when you left, and your PC will start faster. To resume from sleep mode, move the mouse around, or press any key, or press the Power button.
Another option is to lock your Windows 11 computer so that others don’t see your work and can't access your account.
If you have a family computer that you share with others, you should know how to sign out of your account, so that other people can sign in with theirs. Knowing how to restart your computer is helpful, too, especially after a Windows 11 update is installed or when you encounter problems.
Here’s how to do all those tasks:
1 Click or tap the Start icon.The Start menu is displayed. (Refer to Figure 1-1.)
2 Click or tap the power icon, which is at the bottom-right corner of the Start menu.You see all the options from the Power menu, as shown in Figure 1-7. You can choose Sleep, Shut Down, or Restart. Clicking or tapping one of these options starts the specified action immediately.
3 Click or tap your user account name in the bottom-left corner of the Start menu.A menu opens with options related to your user account, as shown in Figure 1-8, including Lock and Sign Out.
4 Choose Sign Out.The Windows 11 lock screen is shown, where you see the time and date.
5 Click or tap anywhere on the lock screen or press Enter. Enter your user password or PIN.You return to the Windows 11 desktop.
FIGURE 1-7: Use the Power menu to sleep, shut down, or restart your device.
FIGURE 1-8: From this menu, you can lock your computer or sign out.
Taking Screen Shots
One of these days, you'll be using an app on your Windows 11 PC and an error will occur. To find a solution, it's often helpful to take a screen shot of what you see on the screen and share it with others. In Windows 11, you can do so in many ways. You could press the Print Screen key on your keyboard, but that method stores your screen shot in the clipboard, and you must then paste the shot in an image-editing app such as Paint.
One cool aspect of Windows 11 is that Microsoft has decided to create a new and much improved Snipping Tool app. It's a mix of the old version in Windows 7 and the Snip & Sketch app in Windows 10, which many people ignored. With the snipping tool, you can capture a full-screen screen shot, a rectangular screen shot, a free-form screen shot (draw any shape you want on the screen), or the window of a specific app. The snipping tool calls those screen shots snips.
Here’s how to use the snipping tool in Windows 11 to take a screen shot of the entire screen:
1 Press Windows+Shift+S.You see a menu at the top of the screen, with several screen shot-taking icons, as shown in Figure 1-9.FIGURE 1-9: The screen shot-taking options offered by the snipping tool.
2 Click or tap the fourth icon, which is full-screen snip.A notification on the right side of the screen tells you that a snip was saved to the clipboard.
3 Click or tap the Snipping Tool notification.The Snipping Tool app opens (as shown in Figure 1-10), displaying the screen shot you just took. The app gives you access to plenty of image-editing tools, such as pens, highlighters, and erasers.FIGURE 1-10: Use the snipping tool to edit your screen shots.
4 Click or tap the save icon (disk) at the top right of Snipping Tool.The Save As dialog is shown, where you can choose the folder where the screen shot is saved. By default, screen shots are named using the date and time when they were taken. You can type a new name in the File Name field.
5 Click or tap the Save button.Your screen shot is saved in the Pictures folder.
6 In the Snipping Tool window, click or tap X to close the app.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Windows 11 has hundreds of keyboard shortcuts. I don’t use many of them because they’re difficult to remember. However, some of them are easy to remember and will make your work with Windows 11 a lot easier.
Ctrl+C copies whatever you’ve selected and puts it on the clipboard. On a touchscreen, you can do the same thing in most applications by tapping and holding down, and then choosing Copy.
Ctrl+X cuts whatever you’ve selected and puts it on the clipboard. Again, you can tap and hold down, and Cut should appear on the menu.
Ctrl+V pastes whatever is in the clipboard to the current cursor location. Tap and hold down usually works.
Ctrl+A
