How To Create A Shortcut For Any ‘Modern’ Windows App

How To Create A Shortcut For Any ‘Modern’ Windows App

With Windows 10, lots of built-in apps (like the calculator) are now “Modern UI” apps. Other Modern UI apps (like Netflix) are a lot more useful now that you can run them in a window. There’s just one problem: There’s no obvious way to make shortcuts of these apps so you can put them on your desktop, or start them with an app like Launchy.

Luckily, there is a hidden way:

  1. Open File Explorer and paste the following in the address bar:
    %windir%explorer.exe shell:::{4234d49b-0245-4df3-b780-3893943456e1}
  2. Press Enter. You should be greeted with a secret folder containing a bunch of random apps and actions.
  3. Find the Modern app you want to create a shortcut to. Right-click on it and choose “Create shortcut”. It will show up on your desktop.

From there, you can do whatever you want with the shortcut — leave it on your desktop for quick launching, or — if you’re a Launchy user like me — put it in a folder and add that folder to Launchy’s catalogue. It’s annoying that you have to do it one-by-one, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

This trick has been around since Windows 8, but with Modern apps becoming more prevalent in Windows 10, this trick became more useful.

How to Create a Shortcut for Windows 8 Metro Apps on the Desktop [Spiceworks]


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