Manage your tiles on the Windows 8 Start screen

One of the most important things in the redesign of Windows 8 is the inclusion of tiles, small squares that make up a start screen quite dynamic showing in striking colors the necessary information to show what happens in our installed applications.

In addition to showing the basic information of each application, the home screen can allow us to anchor in useful folders and shortcuts to some web pages, this of course natively, since with a little help from software our files of any type can also end up occupying your important space on the home screen.

Create tiles and live tiles from your favorite applications

Any application installed in Windows 8 can be tiled on the start screen, by going through an installation of either a Modern UI or desktop application the corresponding tile will be created on the home screen.

But if you have unpinned that tile, it's so easy to put it back, since you just need to use the search to find the application you want to pin, give a secondary click on its icon and select pin at the beginning from the corresponding app bar.

Once having the application tile on the home screen we also have several configuration options giving secondary click on it, we can choose between two different sizes as well as activate or deactivate the operation as live tile, taking into account that the consumption of resources of a live tile is higher than that of a common tile.

Create tools from your favorite websites

In addition to pinning applications for both the Modern UI and the desktop we can create tiles from our favorite websites, the easiest method is to do it from Internet Explorerin its Metro version: load the page that we want to anchor and select anchor at the beginning from the app bar.

In the desktop version you can also pin sites to the home screen from the tools menu but the most notable difference between the first method is that the tiles pinned from Internet Explorer of the Modern UI shows more visually beautiful icons although it should be noted that in neither of the two cases are they live tiles.

Create tiles from your favorite folders

Folders can also appear in the Modern UI, for this we have to search for the folder we want to anchor from the file explorer, give a secondary click on it and, like the other methods, select anchor to start.

Only here we have to consider that only folders and zipped folders are those that can be pinned to the start, the tile that is create one of simple size and the same without update option.

Create a tile from any file

All of the aforementioned tile management methods are included natively in Windows 8, but with a little help we can increase the possibilities by including the very useful pinning of any file to our start screen.

Here the application that we recommend is called Tile A File, which is available in the Windows Store, is compatible with the RT version and it is completely free, its operation would be:

• Select the file, it can be of any type from multimedia to specific formats.
• Provide a name for the tile.
• Pin the file to the start screen.

One more advantage of Tile A File is that the tiles that are created from our files are double in size, leaving an extra option Modern UI customization.

These are the simplest methods of tile management in Windows 8, if you think some important detail has been missing, feel free to suggest it on the comments.

In Xataka Windows | Tricks and guides for Windows 8