Upgrading to Windows 11: Features, Training, and Tips

Hi, I’m Jess Schneider, and I’m a technical trainer with Dataprise. And I’m going to tell you a little bit about Microsoft ending support for Windows 10, and why it’s important that your organization gets upgraded to Windows 11 as soon as possible.

Security Risks of Not Upgrading

Now there’s a lot of reasons to upgrade to Windows 11. It offers some cool new features and increased security options, but that should not be your organization’s main motivation for upgrading to Windows 11 at this point.

While these features are great, the main reason to upgrade to Windows 11 now is that Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 10. Windows 10 reaching end of support means Microsoft will no longer provide security updates, bug fixes, or technical support after the final date. This means that while technically you can still use Windows 10, you will run into issues in the future if you continue to use it. Running on Windows 10 when it’s no longer supported means that your organization might have increased security risks.

Hackers often wait until a support ends before exploiting known vulnerabilities. If Microsoft no longer supports security updates and fixes bugs and issues, your system becomes a larger target for ransomware, phishing attacks, and other security threats.

Compatibility Issues and Limited Functionality

You may also experience software compatibility issues. Eventually, Microsoft apps will stop supporting Windows 10. Without Microsoft pushing any new updates to your computer, you won’t be able to use all the new features in apps like Teams and Outlook, which are constantly updating.

And lastly, over time, you will see limited functionality. You may notice issues with performance, meaning your computer will move a bit slower. And eventually, because Microsoft apps will stop supporting Windows 10, not only will you not get the latest updates, but you may not even be able to continue to use those apps anymore. Websites and other services might stop supporting older browsers and OS features.

So ultimately, we’re recommending the switch to Windows 11 because it’s going to provide the most up-to-date and secure working environment for you and your organization.

What Can You Expect with Windows 11?

Increased Security

So let’s talk a little bit about what we can expect when we upgrade to Windows 11. Windows 11 has some new built-in security features. Microsoft is reporting that organizations who switched over to Windows 11 have seen a decrease in issues with security, reporting fifty eight percent fewer security incidences.

Microsoft also shared that attacks on computer hardware for organizations using Microsoft 11 dropped to just a third of what they used to be using Windows 10. Not only is Windows 11 more secure, but it’s faster.

Increased Performance

Windows 11 is designed to help users multitask. If you’re using a modern device, you might notice things like faster performance to twice as fast when working in office apps, quicker web browsing, and even longer battery life on laptops.

In fact, some users have seen up to 2.7 more hours of battery time with Windows 11. Now, these improvements will depend on your computer’s hardware, but overall, Windows 11 is built to make everyday tasks feel faster and more efficient.

What to Do Now?

Windows 10 officially reached its end of support on October 14, 2025. If you still have users on Windows 10, your organization is at risk because Microsoft will no longer provide feature updates, technical assistance, and most importantly, security updates.

It’s crucial your organization makes a plan to get any remaining Windows 10 users upgraded as soon as possible, and Dataprise is here to help. To learn more about how our Dataprise team can support your organization with the Windows 11 upgrade, please reach out to our marketing team at [email protected]. They’ll be happy to connect you with someone who can help. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Hi, I’m Jess Schneider, and I’m a technical trainer with Dataprise. As you may know, Microsoft announced that Windows 11 reached end of support on October 14, 2025, so it’s time to upgrade to Windows 11. Once you’ve made the switch, this video will help you learn how to customize your Windows 11 experience.

With Windows 11, there’s a lot that won’t change at all, but there are some differences you’ll start to notice. So let’s talk about how we can customize our Windows 11 experience.

Changing Your Task Bar Preferences

One of the first things users notice is that the Start Bar, your search bar, and any pinned apps are now centered on your taskbar.

Personally, I much prefer this because it draws my attention to the tools I use most frequently, but you can always edit and change this. To edit our taskbar, we can right click on any empty space on the taskbar here and select Taskbar settings. There’s a few things you can do from this space, like decide if we want a search bar, whether or not we want to enable widgets, and if we look down here in our taskbar behaviors, we’ll have to click this arrow to see everything, but we will have the taskbar alignment.

In Windows 11, the default is to have it centered. You can always come to this drop down menu and select this option for Left if you want it to default back to the Windows 10 behavior. With our settings open, I just want to highlight this section here on the left called Accessibility.

Windows 11 Accessibility Features

Microsoft has always offered accessibility features, but Windows 11 makes it easier to access and customize them. So if we click into this section here, it will break down your options by vision, hearing, and interaction.

With every version of Windows, their accessibility features get better and now there’s more options for changing your text size, working with color filters and contrast themes, new options for captioning, voice access, and more. I highly encourage you to check out this section to learn more about customizing your Windows 11 experience and how some of these features might improve your working conditions.

Let’s get this closed out and we’re going to talk a little bit about Outlook.

Accessing Your Preferred Version of Outlook in Windows 11

Any new device that is purchased will come with Windows 11 and will likely have New Outlook as the default. If you’re not getting a new device and simply upgrading to Windows 11, you should be able to use Classic Outlook when you upgrade to Windows 11. But, there is a chance it might default to New Outlook, and if you’re not ready for that just now, let’s talk about how we can revert back.

Right now, we are in what Microsoft is calling the “opt-in phase” for New Outlook, which means that you should have the option to choose whether or not you want to use New Outlook. So in the corner of Classic Outlook, you’ll see this toggle here, meaning you can switch into New Outlook to test some of the new features, but you’ll always be able to switch back because whenever we are in New Outlook, you should see the same toggle here that allows us to get back to Classic Outlook. And sometimes, we can even run these two programs side by side to really compare the differences. However, especially with newer devices that run on Windows 11, we might see that toggle disappear.

So let’s talk about how we can get back to Classic Outlook if we no longer see that toggle. We’re here in New Outlook, and as you can see, even running on Windows 11, I still see that toggle up at the top. But if you don’t, we can go into the Help tab up here at the top, and you’ll see the option here to go back to Classic Outlook. When we click that, this pop up here will ask us to provide feedback, which you are more than welcome to do, or you can hit skip feedback.

From here, it will likely open both instances of Outlook, so I’ll have New Outlook open as well as Classic Outlook. From here, I can always right click the Classic Outlook icon to pin it to my taskbar. I can also right click New Outlook and unpin it from my taskbar so I only have one instance of Outlook pinned and therefore it’s a lot easier to make sure Classic Outlook becomes my default.

What to Do Next:

To learn more about how our Dataprise team can support you with your Windows 11 upgrade, or learn about how our training team can help your users, please reach out to our marketing team at [email protected]. They’ll be happy to connect you with someone who can help.

Thank you for your time. We look forward to hearing from you.

Hi, I’m Jess Schneider, and I’m a technical trainer with Dataprise. As you may know, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025, so it’s time to upgrade to Windows 11! Not only will switching to Windows 11 help keep your device up to date and more secure, but Windows 11 is also designed to help with multitasking. With features like snap layouts, users can quickly organize multiple windows into clean, efficient grids, making it easier to stay focused and productive. The updated file explorer also supports tabbed browsing, allowing you to manage files across different locations without opening multiple windows, streamlining workflows, and reducing clutter. So let’s see these in action!

New Windows 11 File Explorer Options

For our first multitasking tip, we’re going to open up our file explorer here and explore some new options that make accessing, finding, and moving files a lot easier. In your file explorer, you now have a homepage where you can see recommended files, recent files, and even add files to your favorites so they are a lot easier to find.

Another new feature is that we now have the option to have tabs. So I can have my OneDrive folder open right here, and then if I go ahead and click this plus sign here, I have a new tab open where I might want to jump into a different folder. You can also right click on a folder and select to open it in a new tab here as well.

So think of these tabs in File Explorer like tabs in your web browser. Instead of opening multiple windows, you can now have several folders open in one window, each in its own tab. This helps keep your desktop clean and makes switching between folders to search for files much faster. So again, this is really going to come in handy when you’re searching for different files and need to look in multiple places to find what you need access to, but it can also make it really easy to drag and drop files between spaces.

So now I have my OneDrive open, and I also have a few shortcut files open in different tabs. This is gonna make it a lot easier to search between these folders, but if I’m in my OneDrive here, and I have a file I want to move into one of these other spaces, it’s really easy to move that by dragging and dropping. So I’m gonna go ahead and find a file here, and let’s say I want this file to now live in my live training general folder. I can go ahead and click on the file and simply drag and drop it into this new space here. Now it’s been successfully moved from one space to another without having to have multiple windows open and learning to move files from your OneDrive into a shared space helps eliminate duplicate files.

Improved Snap Layout Features in Windows 11

For our last tip here, we’re going to talk about the improved Snap Layout feature available in Windows 11.

Snap layouts allow you to arrange multiple windows on your screen in predefined configuration. This makes multitasking easier by letting you quickly snap windows into place without manually resizing them. To use snap layouts, you can hover over the maximize button in one of your windows, and you’ll see your options here. And as long as you’re sort of clicked into a window here, you can use the keyboard shortcut, the Windows key + Z, or you can click on one of your windows and drag it to the top of your screen to access your snap layouts.

Let’s see this a little bit more in action. So I have a couple different apps here open, and I wanna put them side by side. One option I have is I can hover over the maximize button here, and I’ll see some of my snap layout options.

So right now it is showing me that I can put my PowerPoint next to my Edge window along with my OneNote notebook. Showing me I can have all four here. So my Edge window, my PowerPoint, my OneNote notebook, and Teams. If I wanted to customize this on my own, I could use one of these blank options here.

So if I want to have my Edge window, my OneNote notebook, and Teams open, I can select this one. So I will select to put my Edge window here, and then I’ll have different options. I’ll select to put my OneNote here, and I’ll select to put my Teams right here. Now this creates a grouping.

So when I hover over on my taskbar, any of these apps, I’ll see that I have the group here. So I can always open it, minimize it, move it around.

I can close it and would close all three apps here as well. And once you create one, you’re not limited to just using it. So if I no longer need Teams here, maybe I wanna hover over my OneNote notebook, and I could select a different option here like this. I can have my OneNote notebook side by side here with my Edge browser.

So this just makes it a lot easier to move around your windows, keep things side by side, and have things open at the same time without always having to manually resize them.

What to Do Next:

To learn more about how our Dataprise team can support you with your Windows 11 upgrade, or to learn more about how our training team can help your users, please reach out to our marketing team at [email protected]. They’ll be happy to connect you with someone who can help.

Thank you so much for your time, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Hi, I’m Jess Schneider, and I’m a technical trainer with Dataprise. As you may know, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. So it’s time to upgrade to Windows 11. If you’re still not convinced Windows 11 will be a better experience for you and your users, we have a few final tips and tricks to share with you. Some things in Windows 11 have improved functionality, and we’re going to start with the Snipping Tool.

Windows 11 Snipping Tool and Screenshot Options

I think the easiest way to open up this tool is using the keyboard shortcut, which is the Windows Key + Shift + S.

When we do that, our Snipping Tool is now open. Let’s talk about our options. It will likely default to using this camera here, which is supposed to represent a photo, meaning it’s like you’re taking a photo of your screen or a portion of your screen.

We have some options here on what shape we would like that screenshot to be. We can make it a rectangle, take a screenshot of a window, of our full screen, or a free form shape.

I’m gonna click out of that and what’s really awesome about the snipping tool now is that you have the ability to take screen recordings. So instead of clicking on this camera icon, we are going to click on this video icon here.

And we will have to use the rectangular framing option to select where we want to record our screen and you’ll be able to give it access to your mic and even your computer sound. This makes it super easy to create video tutorials for others. I’m going to click back into our camera option here.

Another option I want to show you is the Markup option, which allows you to take a screenshot and instantly create annotations for your screenshot. So let’s look at that by clicking the Markup option here and we are just going to come over here and take a random screenshot.

Now that we’ve got the image we’re screenshotting, we have options to write on the screenshot, highlight, erase, and create shapes.

If we hop over here, we also have the option to instantly share the screenshot. This next icon here allows you to do a visual search in Bing, which can be really helpful for error messages you might get, And this option here also allows you to upload the screenshot to the free version of Copilot so you can ask questions, which again might be helpful with error messages or other options within M365 programs you might have questions on.

I’m going to go ahead and close this out here and I am just going to go ahead and take a screenshot without that markup option to show you what it would look like to mark it up once it’s done.

So I’m going go ahead and hit this markup and share here and we’re going talk about some of the options you have here. So you still have access to your pen, highlighter, eraser and the ability to create shapes.

You can crop your screenshot as well. But you also have this really cool Text Actions option. This allows you to highlight text, copy text and even quickly redact things like email addresses or phone numbers from screenshots.

Now from this menu, you can also copy or save a screenshot and you can even create a new snippet from here. What’s nice about creating a new snippet from here is that you have the delay feature, which we didn’t see when we initially used that keyboard shortcut. This was a feature available in Windows 10, so I’m excited to see that it is still here. If you’re familiar with the Snipping tool, you might know it defaults to placing your screenshots in your clipboard.

Clipboard History

A nice feature with Windows 11 is the ability to access your clipboard history with ease and see all of the things you’ve copied throughout the day. So I’m going to close this out and we’re going to open up a blank Word document here and talk about how we can access our clipboard history. To access your clipboard history, use the keyboard shortcut Windows Key + V. Here is a list of all the things I’ve copied today.

If I simply click on one of them, it’ll paste it right here in the document. I can also pin things I don’t want to lose, and if I hit the three dots next to something that is text, I’ll have the ability to paste it in plain text, or I can also delete this. This allows you to copy multiple things and paste them all at one time, rather than copying, pasting, and then copying the next thing, coming into your document, and pasting it. This also helps you access important things you may have accidentally copied over.

Turn Websites into Apps with Shortcuts

We’re going to transition to Edge for our next tip.

Now, if you’ve been using Chrome, you might already know this tip, but if you’re an Edge user like me, the upgrade to Windows 11 allows you to easily turn websites into apps.

Microsoft offers a lot of really helpful cloud based apps, like Planner, Bookings, and Forms. Because these are cloud based apps, they don’t have desktop apps we can use. To use these apps, we typically have to find them on the browser or add them to another app like Microsoft Teams. While this works great for some folks, others really want to access that app without taking all of those additional steps.

So let’s use Microsoft Planner as an example here.

So Planner is an application I love because I can track all my personal tasks in there, but also my team uses Planner for our departmental tasks.

I just wish I had easier access to it so I don’t have to open the browser every time or go into Teams to view my plans and tasks. So I’ve got Planner opened here in the browser and more specifically, I have this open here in Microsoft Edge.

I’m gonna come up to the corner and go to these three dots here.

And from here, I’m gonna click into more tools. Now I already have two really helpful options here. I can pin this website to my taskbar, so that means it would build a shortcut to the Planner app down here in my taskbar. And I also have the ability to pin this to my Start menu.

So that means whenever I use this Windows icon to open up my Start Menu, I’ll see a shortcut to Planner built there. For a lot of websites, these might be great options. But if I come into the Apps option here, you’ll see I have the option to install this site as an app. And that offers us even more options than just the ability to pin this website to our start or taskbar.

So let’s go ahead and click that here.

From here, we get to customize the app. We can rename it, so let’s go ahead and call this Planner. And if we wanted to, we could edit the logo here. Right now, it’s using the Microsoft default logo for Planner, so I’m gonna keep that and I will hit install now.

When we do that, we have created that app for Planner, and now we can decide what we wanna allow the app to do. So we can pin it to our taskbar and we can pin it to our start bar.

But we also have the option to create a desktop shortcut. So I’m going go ahead and click that. And this last option is really cool. We can have this auto start when we log into our computers. So when I log on to my computer, Teams and Outlook automatically start for me because those are apps I’m using all the time.

If I wanted to have Planner also auto open, making it even easier to access in order to check on my tasks and to do items, I could simply check this box here. For now, I’m just gonna leave these top three options checked and I’m gonna hit allow. Now you might get this additional pop up here asking you to approve pinning this app to your taskbar. I’m gonna go ahead and hit yes here.

Now we have the app open here as well as the website in the back, so I’m gonna go ahead and close both of those. So now we’re just looking at my desktop here. You’ll see I have the Planner app added to my task app. If I click on my Windows icon here, you’re gonna see it pinned to my start menu.

And if we look in the back here, I have that shortcut added to my desktop as well. If I click to open one of these, I now have Planner essentially opened as an app here. I can control how big I want it. I can access different parts of Planner, all from this app I added so I don’t have to go into my browser, find the website, or open it in something like Teams.

Creating apps from websites can make accessing some of Microsoft’s cloud based apps a lot easier, but this can also help you access websites you frequent with ease.

How to Access Free / Standard Copilot on Windows 11

For our last tip here, we’re going to talk about Microsoft’s free AI tool Copilot. Now, you can get a paid license to Copilot, but with Windows eleven, you get access to free Copilot. Now, it might depend on what version of Windows 11 you get upgraded to, but newer versions, like the one we have here on our training desktop, will automatically have the Copilot app added. This typically comes pinned to your start menu.

So, if we come down to our Windows icon here, we’ll see the Copilot app. So let’s click here to open that. From this space, you will be able to access the standard or free version of Copilot. You can ask questions, get help creating things, even upload screenshots, images, documents, and more to get support.

If you do not see this pinned to your Start Bar when you get upgraded to Windows 11, you can pin it yourself. I’m gonna go ahead and close this. Open up our Start Bar, and you can use your search here to search for Copilot. Once you find it, right click on the app and you should be able to pin it to your start bar and even your taskbar.

One last tip is that you can actually use a keyboard shortcut to open up a smaller, more condensed version of your Copilot chat.

If you hit the Windows key + C, that will open up this tiny version of your Copilot chat. Now you’ll have a lot less options, but this is really great for asking quick questions.

What to do Next?

To learn more about how our Dataprise team can support you with your Windows 11 upgrade, or to learn about how our training team can help your users, please reach out to our marketing team at [email protected].

They’ll be happy to connect you with someone who can help. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to hearing from you!