I read your earlier tutorial on how to easily take screen captures in Windows 10 but I don’t have a “Screen snip” quick action button on my Notifications pane. How can I add it?
I somehow imagine that most people who use Windows 10 forget about the Notifications pane entirely. It’s part of the weird full-screen Start menu user interface design and as that’s scaled back to being, well, a Start menu again (hurray!) the entire pane has almost vanished. Which is too bad because it’s darn useful for Windows 10 users!
Here’s the main reason it’s helpful: just as it slides off screen, you notice that you have a notification on your Desktop. What was it? What app did it come from? Is it a critical problem? In the old days you’d be out of luck, wondering what you’d missed, but nowadays things are better. Nowadays you have the Notifications pane! It’s accessible with a click on the tiny cartoon talk balloon on the lower right edge of the TaskBar, and slides an entire window from the right edge that has recent notifications on the top (just like your phone!) and rows of shortcut buttons known as “Quick Action Buttons” along the bottom.
Kinda like this:
That’s just the lower portion, of course, but you can see all these handy shortcuts and, if you look closely, that cartoon talk balloon rightmost on the portion of the TaskBar that’s visible.
Useful Quick Action Buttons, for sure, but where’s that Screen Snip? To add it, right-click anywhere in the notifications pane. An Edit button shows up:
Click to choose it and, surprisingly, a menu doesn’t show up. Instead, every Quick Action Button gets a pushpin icon and two new buttons show up along the bottom:
You can hide any of these buttons you don’t think you’ll use (like Airplane mode on a desktop!) by clicking or tapping on the pushpin button, but to add a new button, click on the “+ Add” along the bottom. Now a menu shows up, listing all the Quick Action Buttons that you don’t have displayed:
You can see that I have omitted Screen snip and VPN from my list. I’ll add the former by simply selecting it. The button shows up, woot! While I’m in Edit mode, I can also click and drag the various Quick Action Buttons to ensure that the layout works best for me. Like this:
And that’s how you tame the wild Quick Action Buttons and add Screen snip to the list as you desire. Good luck!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Microsoft Windows for many years. Please check out my extensive Windows help here on the site for tons of useful tips and tutorials!