I really like having the weather show up in the Taskbar in the latest Windows 11! It accurately shows my current temperature and forecast, but is there a way I can change it to somewhere overseas?
If you look through a history of Microsoft Windows, you’ll see that the Taskbar hasn’t changed much since the early days. Sure, there’s been some polish and better colors and shading, but it really remained functionally the same for the longest time. Then Windows 11 moved all the current program icons to the middle of the bar instead of the left edge, including the Start and Search buttons. Big change! But then the left edge was empty and things felt imbalanced. No surprise that one of the most recent updates slapped a tiny weather forecast there as part of the Windows 11 news pane called the Widgets view!
I admit, after having the feature for a few months, I definitely glance at the weather to see the outside temperature, but I don’t find that I click to access the Widgets screen itself very often. Do you? Tell me about it in the comments. To change that weather forecast location, however, you’ll need to get to the weather widget. Here’s how…
ACCESS THE WEATHER WIDGET IN WINDOWS 11
Let’s start with the most basic, the weather forecast tucked into the Taskbar:
As shown, my local weather is 47º F and cloudy. The picture even offers an at-a-glance forecast too, also showing a cloud. Simple enough, right?
Click on the weather forecast, though, and you get the entire Widget pane to show up:
There’s my full weather, and weather location: Boulder, Colorado. Looks like a 44% chance of rain, and pretty typical spring weather for Colorado throughout the week.
CHANGING WEATHER FORECAST LOCATION ON THE TASKBAR
Look closely at the weather widget and you’ll see “•••” on the top right of that sub-window. Click on it and a menu of options appears, kind of like with the old Start menu:
You can change the location by choosing “Customize widget” but for this particular task, you can also use the sneaky shortcut of clicking on the pencil icon immediately adjacent to the name of the current location (you can see it just after the word “Colorado”). Want to make the widget larger or smaller? You can do that too.
I’ll choose “Customize widget” and start entering the name of the city I want to see: Jakarta:
I’m also going to switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius, easily done on this customize view too. With Jakarta and Celsius selected, here’s what I now see:
An 87% chance of rain and a balmy 79ºF sounds like a typical wet fall day in Indonesia. But where this is really fun is when you look on the Taskbar:
And that’s how you can change it to any city you’d like, just about anywhere in the world!
Power Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows for many years and have an extensive Windows Windows 11 help area. Please check it out to find lots of additional tutorials and guides while you’re here. Thanks!
Dave,
Thank you for this post! I saw your mention of it on Twitter earlier today. I had been keeping the Widgets app hidden in the taskbar because until now it was useless to me, but today, I turned it on in settings, then switched the Weather setting in the … menu from medium to small and what do you know! I now have the Weather info on my taskbar. I have left it on the left side on the bar for now, but I may try moving it to the right later on.
When I read your newsletter, if I don’t learn something new and useful, I get reminded about something I may not yet have done. Either way, I enjoy reading it and I look forward to many more.
Thank you for all you do,
Ernie