If you’re using the Edge app for Android or iOS, web pages you open on your phone or iPad will show up in the Windows Timeline on your PC, so you can open them there. (In the next version of Windows, 1809, that link is renamed to Open Timeline.) Not just PCs, but not many apps Click ‘See all activities’ to jump into your Timeline, skipping past current open windows and straight to the Earlier Today section. Or you can click anywhere on the background rather than one of the activities to close the Timeline view immediately.Ĭortana offers a smaller snapshot of your Timeline, if you tap or click the Cortana search box in the taskbar but don’t start typing anything. If you don’t find anything useful, or you triggered the Timeline view by accident, you can close it by pressing Windows-Tab again, or the Esc key (if you’ve scrolled down the timeline or opened more details of a specific day, each time you press Esc you’ll go back up a level). Right-click on an activity to remove it from your Timeline, or to clear all activity for that day. Once you find the document or site you want, you can click on it to open it.
If you use your PC for a lot of things at once rather than carefully opening a set of documents and web pages to work on together, searching is going to be the most efficient way of using the Timeline to find things anyway. You’ll be able to scroll back to see applications, files and websites from the past 30 days on your current device almost immediately it can take up to 24 hours to see details from other devices there as well (although we started seeing results in as little as ten minutes in some cases).Įven if you don’t see an activity from another PC listed in your Timeline, it will show up when you search by name. If you want to turn the cloud syncing back off, you can do that from Settings/Privacy/Activity History (for one or all of your accounts). If you want your Timeline to go back further, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the ‘Turn on’ button under ‘See more days in Timeline’ this will also sync activity on your PC through your Microsoft and Office 365 accounts. This doesn’t search inside the content of documents, but it’s good for finding files or searching your browser history - something Edge still doesn’t let you do. You can also use the search box on the top right to search for an application like Windows Paint and see all the files you’ve had open in it, or for keywords in the title of documents or on web pages you’ve visited. Click the link that tells you how many activities Windows recorded to see the longer list, grouped by hour and sorted in reverse order. If you had a lot of activity on one day, you’ll see what Windows considers to be the top activities (which seems to be based on how long you were active in the app or how long you spent on the website). Move down to see applications and individual web pages (including PDFs) that you’ve had open in the last couple of days. When you use the Windows task switcher (by clicking the icon on the Windows taskbar, pressing Windows-Tab or swiping up on the trackpad with three fingers), as well as large thumbnails for all the currently open windows you get a Timeline scrollbar on the right.
SEE: Software usage policy (Tech Pro Research) Back in time The idea of the Windows Timeline is to extend that to multiple applications, first in Windows and then across other devices. If you create a Word document on one PC, you’ll see it in the list of recent files when you open Word on a PC, Mac or iPad, or when you visit the OneDrive website. Office 365 already does something similar across different devices. The Windows Timeline, which arrived in the 1803 release of Windows 10, is a way of making it faster and easier to go back in time - not just on your PC but (eventually) on any device connected to it via the Microsoft Graph.
So when an update restarts your PC overnight, getting back to where you were and what you were working on takes time.
One of the most annoying things about updates in Windows 10 is that you can’t rely on the applications you were using opening back up when Windows restarts. Windows PowerToys 0.62.0 adds three new utilities to the Windows power user toolkitĭefend your network with Microsoft outside-in security services