Run multiple virtual desktops - Windows Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you've ever been working in Windows and had multiple applications running at the same time, you may start to feel overwhelmed. Like your desktops getting cluttered and disorganized. Yes, you can minimize apps and see them running on the Taskbar and switch between them that way. But there might be a better option. For example, let's say there are a number of apps that you run in your work environment and a number of apps you use in a personal environment. In that case, you might consider using multiple desktops. That's what we're going to explore in this movie. We'll start here in Windows 11 down below on the Taskbar. There's a button here that when you hover over it, will show you a miniature of your desktop and an option to create a new one. It's called Task View and you have it in Windows 10. We'll explore it in a minute. When you click this, though, you'll notice that we have those two options and then you see miniatures of all your apps. So you can switch between them if you wanted to. Alt, Tab still works. But what we're going to do is separate our work environment from our personal environment, by creating a new desktop, all we do is click New Desktop to do that. And you can see a brand new desktop with nothing on it is created. Notice the name is by default Desktop 2 because we have a Desktop 1, but we can rename these. Let's right click and select Rename. And we'll call this Personal by typing right over Desktop 2. Press Enter, to lock it in. And while we're at it, we may as well, right click Desktop 1 over here and choose Rename to give it a more appropriate name. How about Work? Just to keep it simple, press Enter. And now we have our two different desktops. So if we wanted to, we could start moving things over from our Work environment to Personal. So just hover over Work, and you'll see all the things that are running here in the background. Maybe we use Paint and the Notepad in our Personal environment or shopping lists. So in that case, we could go to Paint, for example, right click and notice there's a Move to option here, and we can choose different desktops. We can have more than two as well if we want to create additional environments, but let's choose Personal to move it over there. We'll do the same with our Untitled Notepad, right click it and choose, Move to and Personal. And now we have a couple of apps running in each environment and we can switch between them by clicking them here. So click Personal to go into that environment, go back down to the Task View button, just hover over it and go to Work and click there to switch over to Work. So you get a feel for how you can keep your different apps separate and stay focused and organized in different environments. Let's see what it's like in Windows 10. Here in Windows 10, I have the same apps running. And if you want to follow along, you can see down below, I have Word, the Calculator Notepad and the Paint app, all running at the same time on a single desktop. And you can see how cluttered this looks. If we go down to the Taskbar though, and go to the task view button and click it, you can see miniatures so we can switch between these easily, but also a New Desktop button that we can click to create a brand new desktop. There it is Desktop 2. If you right click this, you'll notice that there's no Rename option, it's just Desktop 2. But we can move things from Desktop 1 over to Desktop 2. And in fact, we can do it a little bit differently. For example, if in Desktop 2, we want our personal apps, like the Paint program. We can click and drag it there and release. Let's do the same now with our Untitled Notepad, click and drag it over there. And now you can see that we have two different desktops with two different apps running in different environments. To switch between them, we just simply click them to expand that desktop. Now here's something cool. If we go down to the Task View button and this works as well in Windows 11, and we go to Desktop 2, let's say we don't need it any longer, but we still have apps running there. Go up to the X and close it. And you'll notice that the two running apps, get moved automatically back to the first desktop, which means we can click anywhere in the background to see them all running here. We can close them up when we're done with them. In fact, we can close up all of the apps running here in our Windows 10 environment without saving anything. And you can do the same if you are in Windows 11, just close everything up, if you're prompted to save, just choose Don't Save, to return to an empty desktop.