Utilising Your Pinned Applications
If you use pinned applications on your taskbar, you may be surprised to learn that you’ve already set up hotkeys for them! All you have to do is hold down the Win key on your keyboard and push the number that corresponds to the position of the app on your taskbar like, for instance, in this picture.
If you pressed “Windows Key + 1.” you’d open Internet Explorer. If you did “Windows Key + 2,” you’d open Windows Explorer, and “Windows Key + 3” wouldopen the Store app. This means that apps pinned to your taskbar already have their own shortcut for it! You can pin apps either by right-clicking a shortcut and clicking “Pin to Taskbar” or right-clicking an app already on the taskbar and pinning it that way instead.
Creating a Shortcut
But what if you don’t want to pin software to your taskbar? Thankfully, Windows 10 has custom shortcuts functionality outside of pinned taskbar apps. All you need is a shortcut on hand, and you’re good go to. First, right-click the shortcut of the program you want to make a shortcut for. Click Properties.
Then, click on the “Shortcut” tab if you’re not taken to it by default.
Here you’ll see a range of different options to change. The one you’re looking for is called “Shortcut key” and should be set to “None.” Click within the box that says “None,” then press a character key on your keyboard. Windows 10 should automatically create a “Ctrl + Alt” combination with the key that you just pressed. Make sure to test the shortcut before you set it, as something else might already be using that specific shortcut combination!
Once you OK out of the window, you’ll be able to press the key combination you defined to launch the app.
What If There’s No Shortcut?
But what if you can’t find a shortcut for what you want to open? Perhaps it’s buried somewhere in your files, or it’s a system-based application which naturally doesn’t have shortcuts on the desktop. How do you make a keyboard shortcut for it? To do this, we need to open the Applications folder. You can do this by opening the Run window (You can do so with Win + R – there’s another shortcut for you!) and typing shell:AppsFolder into the box and clicking OK.
This will show you a huge list of executables, including applications which don’t usually have shortcuts on the desktop. You can sort them by name if you want to find the one you’re looking for faster. Once you’ve found it, however, you’ll come across a snag; when you right-click an application, no “Properties” option appears!
However, if you look through the menu, you’ll find “Create shortcut.” If you click this, you can then create a shortcut that appears on your desktop. You can then set a hotkey for it through the usual method.
Keeping It Short
Creating custom keyboard shortcuts for Windows 10 can make opening applications really easy. Thankfully, it’s not difficult whatsoever, and if you have pinned software on your taskbar, you already have some set up! How often do you use keyboard shortcuts in work or daily life? How do you set them up? Let us know below.
