Task View

Task View is a sweet feature that first appeared in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 and continues to carry over into Server 2025. It is a similar idea to that of holding down the Alt key and then pressing Tab in order to cycle through the applications that you currently have running. For anyone who has never tried that, go ahead and hold down those two keys on your keyboard right now. Depending on what version of Windows you are running, your screen might look slightly different from this, but in effect, it’s the same information. You can see all of the programs you currently have open, and you can cycle through them from left to right using additional presses of the Tab button. Alternatively, use Alt + Shift + Tab in order to cycle through them in reverse order. When you have many windows open, it is perhaps easier to simply use the mouse to jump to any specific window:

Figure 1.22: Alt + Tab to shuffle between open windows

Task View is quite a bit more powerful than this, because it adds the capability of managing multiple full desktops’ worth of windows and applications. For example, if you were working on two different projects on the same server, and each project required you to have many different windows open at the same time, you would start to burn a lot of time switching back and forth between all of your different apps and windows in order to find what you were looking for. Using Task View, you could leave all of your open windows for the first project on your first desktop, and open all of the windows dealing with the second project on a second desktop. Then, with two clicks, you could easily switch back and forth between the different desktops, using the Task View button. By default, Task View is the little button down in the taskbar, immediately to the right of the search bar. Go ahead and click on it now—it looks like this:

Figure 1.23: The Task View button

You’ll now see a listing of your currently open windows; this looks very similar to the Alt + Tab functionality we looked at earlier. The primary difference is the option called out in Figure 1.23, which gives you the option to create a new desktop. Go ahead and click on that, and you will now discover that clicks on the Task View button show that you are running two separate desktops, Desktop 1 and Desktop 2. Flip back and forth between the two desktops, and you will find that you can run completely separate applications between the two desktop views. In Figure 1.24, you can tell that I have different things open on Desktop 1 than I do on Desktop 2, and switching between these two desktops is very fast and easy. You can even drag and drop existing windows between different desktops, right on this Task View screen:

Figure 1.24: Navigating multiple desktops

Task View is a great way to stay organized and efficient by utilizing multiple desktops on the same server. I suppose it is kind of like running dual monitors, or three, four, or more, all from a single physical monitor screen.

If you want to avoid having to click on the icon for Task View, pressing WinKey + Tab on your keyboard does the same thing!