How to Use and Customize the Windows 10 Action Center

With the Action Center, Windows 10 finally provides a central place for notifications and quick actions to live. Here’s how to use and customize it.

For the longest time, notifications in Windows have been something of a joke. Even in Windows 8, which finally provided toast notifications that could pop up and then expire, there was no way to see expired notifications you might have missed. Windows 10 fixes this with the Action Center, a slide-out pane that groups and displays notifications, and also provides access to quick actions like Wi-Fi, Quiet Hours, and Night Light.

The Action Center is straightforward to use, and it’s also pretty customizable.

View Notifications in the Action Center

Toast notifications still reign in Windows 10, sliding out from the bottom right edge of your desktop (just above the notification area of the taskbar) whenever an app needs to let you know something.

If you don’t dismiss a notification yourself, it disappears automatically after about six seconds. Whenever you have new notifications, the Action Center icon in the notification area turns white and displays a number badge showing how many new notifications there are (on the left, below). If there are no new notifications, that icon looks empty and badge-free (on the right).

Click that icon (whatever state it’s in) to open the Action Center, a pane that slides out from the right edge of your display. The Action Center shows all your recent notifications, grouped by app.

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How to Show a Google Calendar in Outlook

Having multiple calendars with different appointments on each one is a sure path to double bookings and an argument with someone you’ve annoyed. Get more organized and more reliable by subscribing to your Google Calendar in Outlook.

To do this, you’ll need a Google Calendar and Outlook (which is fairly obvious), but you won’t need any plug-ins, add-ins, extensions, or 3rd party tools. Both Google and Microsoft support the iCal format, which despite the name has nothing to do with Apple and is, in fact, short for “iCalendar.” It’s an open standard for exchanging calendar and scheduling information between users and computers that has been around since the late 1990s. This means you can subscribe to them if you have the right link, which is the method we’ll use here.

Show a Google Calendar in Outlook

Because we’re going to show a Google Calendar in Outlook, we need to get the link from the Google Calendar first. Log into your Google account and go to Google Calendar. Once you’re there, click on the three dots next to the calendar and then click “Settings and Sharing.”

Scroll down until you come to the “Secret address in iCal format” section. Click the link to highlight it, and then copy it using Ctrl+V or by right-clicking it and selecting “Copy” from the menu.

Now you need to add this link into Outlook, so open Outlook, and go to your calendar. Right-click the “Shared Calendars” option and then select Add Calendar > From Internet

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Announcing LifeSavvy: It’s Like How-To Geek for Everything Else

Today we’re thrilled to finally announce something we’ve been working on for a while: a new site to help us expand our coverage beyond simply tech and gadgets, into the things that matter for everyday life.

For more than a decade, How-To Geek has been where you turn when you want experts to explain technology in terms that everybody can understand. Our articles have been read more than 1 billion times. Where do you go from there?

We first branched out in 2017 because we realized that people were constantly asking us which products they should buy. So we launched Review Geek, where we do thousands of hours of research and testing so you don’t have to. Since launching, millions of people have used our product recommendations to help make their purchasing decisions.

But we didn’t want to stop there. We thought, why can’t we take what makes How-To Geek successful and useful, and do that—but for other areas besides technology?

LifeSavvy: Skills for a Better Life

LifeSavvy is our answer to how we can help people outside of the world of tech. Don’t worry though, we didn’t just round up your favorite tech writers from How-To Geek and tell them to write about fashion and baby products—we went out and hired expert writers that have real-world experience in the things they are writing about, and showed them how we put you, the reader, first.

Whether you’re looking for tips on organization, travel, parenting, fitness, photography, relationships, school, cooking, career, or anything else, our team of expert writers is here to help explain things the same way How-To Geek has been explaining tech for years.

Don’t Miss Out: Make Sure You Subscribe to LifeSavvy

If you want to keep up to date with everything we’re doing there, you’re going to need to subscribe, which you can do by clicking one of the buttons below. The site just launched like 5 minutes ago, so none of the pages will have any subscribers yet, which means you get to be part of the exclusive club of people who followed us since we launched.

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