From the course: Windows 11 Essential Training

Use the Quick Settings panel - Windows Tutorial

From the course: Windows 11 Essential Training

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Use the Quick Settings panel

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- [Instructor] To make significant changes to your system settings, generally, you would go to the start menu and use the shortcut here to open settings, or if you don't have that shortcut, you can click the button for All apps and scroll through and find and open settings from here. But there actually is a faster way to get to many of the most important settings. In the system tray, on the far-right side of the task bar, you should find a cluster of two or three icons. There's the network icon, the audio icon, and if you're using a laptop, also the battery icon. When you click on this cluster, it opens up the quick settings panel, and this is a place where you can adjust some of your computer settings very easily without going into the main settings tool. Also, in my case, I see media controls up here at the top, and that's because I have a video open in my web browser. It's paused right now, but I could go over to my web browser, and I can see that video here, and I could control it here on the webpage, or I can go to the quick settings panel and control it with the media settings here. So, I can play the video and pause it from here. This is good for videos, but even more useful when you're listening to music. You can control media from the quick settings panel, even when the window is not visible on the screen. Of course, you only see the media controls if you already have something playing, but everything else we see here in quick settings will let you make some adjustments to your system. So, for example, there's the option for the Airplane mode. You can click that button to turn Airplane mode on or off. There's a shortcut here for Bluetooth. If you simply click this Bluetooth button, it turns the entire Bluetooth feature on your computer off completely, which would disable any of your connected devices, and you can click that button again to turn it back on. Or when you see an arrow next to a button, that will open a menu. So in this case, if I click the arrow next to Bluetooth, it gives me the options for pairing a Bluetooth device right here from quick settings. But for now, I'll click the back button up in the top-left corner to take a step back. You also have the option to turn your Wi-Fi on and off from here, or click the arrow to connect to other Wi-Fi networks. And there are even more controls available here if you scroll up or down on this list. Some of these are controls that we will work with in this course, some are not, but they are all shortcuts to controls that you will find in the main window settings. Below that, we see a slider for controlling the volume level of the sound on your computer. And if you click the button next to the volume slider, you'll see this panel, where if you happen to have multiple audio output devices on your computer, you can choose the one you want, or you can scroll down even further where we see the audio mixer. So if you have different applications playing audio, you can control the volume level for each one separately. A moment ago when we played that video, we did not hear the audio from the video because I have the volume level all the way down for my web browser. Once again, I'll click the back button up here at the top. And if you need even more settings related to any of these quick controls, you can just right-click on the button and choose Go to Settings. That will open up the main settings tool where you have all of the controls related to that feature. For now, I'll close this. I'll go back to the quick settings panel. And you can do that with any of these. Just right-click on one of the buttons, click Go to Settings, and it will go to the related section in the main settings application. So I recommend you use the quick settings panel instead of the full settings application whenever you can.

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