Pin people to your Taskbar
1 GOT THE RIGHT VERSION?
This won’t work unless you’ve installed the Fall Creators Update. To check, open the Start menu and choose ‘Settings > System > About’ to check your version number under ‘Windows specifications’. If you’re running the right version, go back to the Start menu and start typing “People” in the Taskbar search box. When the search results appear, select the People app to run it.
2 LINK YOUR ACCOUNTS
If this is the first time you’ve used the People app, you’ll be prompted to link it to your accounts so it can import your contacts. The default accounts are those you’ve set up in Mail and Skype, and these can be quickly synced to the People app. Select Import Contacts, and soon you’ll see your contacts in the People app, from where you can combine, edit, delete and manage them.
3 MY PEOPLE
People may be an app, but My People is what Microsoft calls an ‘experience’. Simply put, My People is the ability to pin your most frequent contacts to the Taskbar, so they’re more accessible. If you can’t see the People button to the right of the Taskbar (it looks like two board game counters standing in a diagonal line), right-click the system tray and select ‘Show People button’.
4 GET PINNING
Left-click the My People button at the right of your Taskbar, and you’ll see suggestions for who to pin based on how often you contact them. You don’t have to accept these suggestions – and as you are limited to three pins, it’s worth putting some thought into. To pin a contact, left-click it, and the first three you choose will appear on the Taskbar to the left of the My People button.
5 MORE PINS
Any other contacts you choose to pin appear in the pop-up menu, in a section called More Pinned Contacts. There’s another way of doing it that’s slightly more flexible – open the People app, right-click a contact, then choose whether to pin it either to the Taskbar or the Start menu. Choose the latter, confirm the pin, and a tile will appear on your Start menu that you can click to open.
6 USE YOUR PINS
Click a pinned contact in your Taskbar, and a pop-up menu appears showing all your recent communications in the accounts you’ve linked the People app to. The ellipsis (...) top right enables you to launch the People app, unpin the contact or edit it, while the three-line menu (top left) switches between Mail view, or the People view. The pop-up stays open until you close it.
7 SEND A MESSAGE
You can use My People to send a message without opening the full app, such as Mail. Select a contact, click the three-line menu and select Mail. This lists your emails, along with a ‘+’ button at the bottom to create a new message. Write your email in the pop-up menu, and either send it or discard it using the buttons at the bottom. Again, it will stick around until you close the menu.
8 SETTINGS
Click the ellipsis at the bottom of the My People pop-up for more options. You can create a new contact, send feedback about the app, and change app settings. In Settings, you can choose whether to turn Taskbar contacts on or off, receive notifications when a new message arrives from a pinned contact, and choose whether that notification plays a sound.