hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can both get and also use windows power toys power toys is a set of free utilities that you can install on windows 10 that make you even more productive and efficient as a few examples there’s a universal color picker if you see a color on your screen you can get the value of it there’s also something called fancy zones which pretty much gives you infinite control over how you organize and position windows on your screen there’s a bulk file renamer there’s also a bulk image resizer alright why don’t we jump on the computer and let’s check these out to get microsoft power toys head to the following website aka dot ms forward slash install power toys at the top you’ll see the most recent release and it may be more recent than what you see here in this video down below you can click on the dot exe to kick off the download and then click on that file to install as a quick side note this is an open source project so you also have the ability to look at all of the source code if you’re interested in seeing how these utilities work for now let’s click on the exe file once you finish downloading and installing power toys you can launch it two different ways go down to your taskbar and within the search field you can type in power toys and you can launch it here alternatively you could also go down to your system tray click on the up carrot and then you’ll see a new icon for power toys when you click on this this will launch the application this drops us into power toys and once again this app includes quite a bit of very rich functionality over on the left hand side you’ll see all of the different utilities that come with power toys and we’re gonna go from top to bottom to walk through what you can do and we’ll start with the color picker this opens up the color picker and just like the name implies i can hover my mouse over anything on my screen and it’ll tell me the exact color value down below we can see the shortcut key that we can press to launch the color picker let’s try this out i’ll press window shift and c and this opens up the color picker so right now as i hover my mouse over my screen you’ll see it show me the exact color value now i really like this blue over here so let me hover over that and then i’ll click on that this now opens up the editor and i can see the blue that i just selected along with that i see the hex value the rgb value and also the hsl value yes these are all the values for the color just in different color formats with any one of these i would get this exact same color now i could click on this if i want to make adjustments to the color but this looks good now that i’ve copied my favorite blue color i can go into an image editing program here for example i’m using getpaint.net by the way this is one of my favorite image editing programs here i can click over on this color and i can now paste in the hex value when i paste it in i get that same blue color here now i can use the paint bucket and i’ve now reproduced that color exactly within my image editing program back within power toys there are all sorts of different settings that you can customize for the color picker one thing that blew away my mind is how many different color formats you have once again this is a super rich tool and for picking colors it’s hard to get better than this this brings us to power toys utility number two fancy zones with fancy zones you can lay out your screen into different zones and then you could snap windows to those zones you might be wondering well doesn’t windows already support snapping here i could take this notepad window and i could snap it to the left hand side of my screen why would i need to use power toys well the version that comes with windows in comparison to power toys is pretty rudimentary here within fancy zones let’s start off by clicking into the layout editor to configure what the zones look like this opens up the layout editor at the very top i have two different monitors hooked up to my computer and i could select the monitor that i want to set up the zones for under that i can set up zones using a template or i could create my own custom zones let’s take a quick look at templates down below here i can set up a column layout i can set up a row layout a grid layout or a priority grid over here i could choose the number of zones that i want right now it’s set to 6 but i could change it down to 5 or 4 or however many zones i want down below i can also choose whether i want space around the zones so when i snap a window is there a little bit of buffer between these different windows i could turn that off if i simply want one zone to run into the next one let’s now click on custom to see how we can set up our own zones here i want to create my own new custom zone so let’s click on this next let’s click on edit selected layout here now i can add my very own zone and here we see a zone and i can position this wherever i want on the screen not only can i position it i can also change the size and make the zones however big or small i want and here i could add another zone until i get my screen how i want it to look back on the main screen i want to move forward with a priority grid so i’ll select this one i also don’t want any space around zones now that i’m all good i’m going to click on apply now that i have my new zone set up i can take one of my windows and if i press the shift key here i can send it to one of these zones so here i can send it to zone 3 and my notepad window will fall within that space here i could take power toys and i’ll press shift again and i want to throw this one into zone 2 so i’ll simply release it right here and that falls directly into zone 2. if i want one of the windows to use up both zone 3 and 4 here i could hover over zone three while pressing the shift key and then i could press the control key and then hover over four and this window will then take up those two zones this brings us to power toy utility number three and that’s file explorer power toys brings additional capabilities to file explorer in the past within file explorer you were unable to preview svg or scalable vector graphics also you weren’t able to preview markdown files now if you toggle these on the preview pane will show you what these look like down below you can also turn on an icon preview for svg files so if you have any svg files instead of showing the icon of the app that opens the svg you’ll be able to see a preview of the file itself to see how this works i’m in file explorer and i have microsoft words logo in svg format when i click on view up on the top bar i can turn on the preview pane that opens up the pane on the right hand side now when i click on this svg i’ll see a preview over in the right hand pane this brings us to power toy number four and this is the bulk image resizer if you’ve ever needed to resize a number of images you probably know that it’s a pain luckily power toys helps automate all of that for us and it makes a job a lot easier over on the right hand side here you can configure what image sizes you want to convert to here i have four defined but i could also add my own sizes down below i could also see the encoding settings that the image resizer will use and here i could specify the file name for the resized files when i hover over i’ll see a few helpful hints to help me formulate the file name i have file explorer open with three of my thumbnails and these are currently in a large file size if i go down to properties and then click on details you’ll see that the dimensions are currently 1280×720 i want to make all of these thumbnails a little bit smaller and in the past once again i’d have to go through one by one instead now i could select all three of these files right click on it and there’s now a new option in my menu to resize the pictures let’s click on that this opens up the image resizer prompt and here i could go with one of my preset settings or down below i could also define a custom setting down here let me go with small because i think that’ll be a good size and next let’s click on resize here now i can see that all of my images have been resized when i right click on it and go to properties and details here now i can see the new dimensions what’s nice too is it maintained the original file name and it appended these size at the end this brings us to power toy number five and that’s the keyboard manager with the keyboard manager i can remap keys and i could also remap shortcuts what does it mean to remap a key well let’s test this out here when i click on remap key here i’ll click on the plus icon and let’s say i want the letter a to actually be the letter b here i can set a so it’s b next let’s click on ok here now if i open the on-screen keyboard if i press the letter a it’ll show up as a b because i remapped a to b b you might be wondering why would you ever want to remap your keys well today most people type on qwerty keyboards and it turns out it’s not the most efficient layout let’s say instead you want to type in devorjack you can use this to remap your keyboard into a new layout that maybe is a little more efficient along with remapping keys you can also remap shortcuts but before we jump into this i want to show you how and why this could be useful here i am in microsoft outlook and i want to find something within this message and pretty much every application i use the shortcut key for find is control f when i press ctrl f in outlook it turns out it’s actually the forward shortcut key if i want to find something in a message i have to press f4 so ideally i’d like to remap this shortcut so i could use control f to find something luckily power toys makes it easy to remap a shortcut let’s click on this button that says remap a shortcut this opens up the remap shortcuts dialog and over here let’s click on the plus icon to create a new remapping over here first off we have to indicate what shortcut we want to remap i’ll click on type and let’s type in the shortcut here i just typed in ctrl f then let’s click on ok to the right of that now i need to map it to another shortcut so i’ll click on type and within outlook it’s f4 so i’m going to click on ok what this will do is control f will do the same thing as f4 over here i can also indicate what the target app is when i click on this i can type in outlook once i’m all done let’s click on ok back now within microsoft outlook when i press ctrl f instead of forwarding the message this opens up find so now i can look for the code for free cookies and here brings me to that point in my message power toy number six i can bulk rename a whole bunch of files here i see a few different settings that i can use but let’s jump over to file explorer and actually rename some files here i have file explorer open and i have three different files that are all appended with small i don’t want this to appear in any of the file names i can select all three files right click on it and there’s now a new option in this context menu called power rename let’s click on that within power rename i see the three files that i selected down below up here i could search for certain texts that i want to remove now i want to remove the space the parentheses small and the parentheses so up here i’ll type in a space and then let’s put in a parenthesis type in small and then close parentheses over down below in the preview you’ll see the original file name and then you’ll see the renamed file name i can also use a bunch of different options as i’m going through and i’m doing my rename i could also replace the text with something else i want to simply leave it blank so my replace text will simply be nothing once i’m all ready to go let’s click on rename and here now i see that my three files have all been successfully renamed this brings us to power toy number seven and this is called power toys run it’s a very quick and fast app launcher right down here i can see the shortcut key that i need to press to launch this so when i press alt space this opens up my launcher let’s say i want to open up my video editing program i use davinci resolve here i can type in davinci and immediately i see davinci resolve pop up over on the right hand side i also have access to some quick tools for example i could run as an administrator i could also open up the containing folder or i could open up the path in a console so here if i click on this this will now launch the application very quickly this brings us to power toy number eight and this is the very last one of today and that’s the shortcut guide now many power users have pride in knowing all the different windows shortcut keys but sometimes you might not remember them or maybe you don’t know all of them trust me i don’t nearly know all of them so what you could do is simply press and hold the windows key and that’ll show you all of the different shortcut keys that you could use depending on the context that you’re in here for example i’m currently on the desktop so if i press the windows key together with the g key that’ll open up a screen recorder over here i can also press the windows key with the plus or minus sign to zoom in or out on my screen so there are lots of very interesting shortcut keys and this shortcut guide will help refresh you or even teach you some new shortcut keys alright if you learned about some new utilities that you think will become part of your daily workflow please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this make sure to hit that subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a comment down below alright well that’s all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music] you