You should be using your Windows PC’s touchscreen: 5 must-know tips

Windows laptops have one big advantage over Macs: touchscreens. I’m not saying you should switch to a touch-first PC experience and throw away your mouse. But too many people discount the usefulness of a touchscreen PC. Those touchscreens can be a big productivity boost.

While I won’t be trading my mouse and keyboard for an all-touchscreen Windows experience any time soon, I always appreciate a touchscreen on a laptop. Whether you’re working with documents, browsing the web, or just watching videos, you might be impressed at just how useful your computer’s touchscreen can be.

Of course, not every modern Windows PC has a touchscreen. But many do — and I know many people aren’t using them to their full potential. Let’s change that, shall we?

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Windows touchscreen tip #1: Sign documents

Let’s start with one of my favorite uses for a touchscreen: quickly signing a document. Yes, there are other ways to do so — you could painstakingly try to draw your signature on your laptop’s touchpad, use an app on your phone, paste in a scanned image of your signature, or even print the document and scan it back in.

But in my experience, the most convenient way to sign a document on the average modern laptop is with your finger — directly on the touchscreen. You can sign a PDF document in Microsoft Edge or use an application like Adobe Reader. Or, you might be asked to sign a document using a web-based signing service like DocuSign. Either way, providing a signature is much easier if your PC has a touchscreen.

Signing a business document is significantly easier with a touchscreen at your disposal.Chris Hoffman, IDG

Windows touchscreen tip #2: Scroll through documents and web pages

A touchscreen is seriously underrated for simply scrolling around in a document or web page. This is especially true when you’re away from your desk — maybe you’re using your laptop on your lap, perhaps you’re crammed into tight quarters in an airline seat, or maybe you’re catching up on some late-night work emails in bed.

Rather than attempting to scroll with the touchpad, it’s often extremely convenient to hold the laptop in a way that lets you scroll around with a finger. This is especially true if you have a flexible laptop that can rotate its hinge 360 degrees, adapting better to close quarters.

I’ll admit it: I find myself sometimes scrolling around on web pages using my finger, even when I’m sitting at my desk with a touchscreen laptop. Give it a try if you haven’t already.

Windows touchscreen tip #3: Zoom in and out

You can also quickly and easily zoom with a touchscreen. While viewing something — Google Maps in a browser, an image, a web page, a document, or whatever else — you can use pinch-to-zoom just as you would on your phone to zoom in and out.

I find this more useful than clicking little zoom buttons or attempting to pinch-to-zoom on my laptop’s trackpad. (You should be able to use pinch-to-zoom with your trackpad, but it’s easier to do on a nice big screen than a smaller little trackpad.)

Windows touchscreen tip #4: Use gestures to navigate the desktop

Windows has a whole collection of its own custom touchscreen gestures waiting to be used. I wanted to start with simple and easy-to-remember tips, but these gestures are also supremely useful.

(You can use similar gestures on your laptop’s touchpad, too.)

Windows 11 PCs have access to more built-in touchscreen gestures than Windows 10 PCs. For example, on a Windows 11 PC with a touchscreen, you can:

Swipe up with one finger from the bottom of your screen to see the Start menu.

Swipe with one finger from the left edge of your screen to see the Widgets pane.

Swipe with one finger from the right edge of your screen to see the notification center.

Swipe up with three fingers to show all open windows with Task View.

Swipe down with three fingers to show the desktop.

Swipe left or right with three fingers to switch to the last app you were using.

Swipe with four fingers from the left or right to switch desktops, if you’re using multiple virtual desktops.

If these don’t work on your Windows 11 PC, head to Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Touch. Ensure the “Three- and four-finger touch gestures” setting is activated here.

For more information about these and ways you can use similar gestures on a laptop’s touchpad, take a look at Microsoft’s official list of touch gestures.

Windows has a variety of potentially useful touchscreen gestures, and all you have to do is tap into them.Chris Hoffman, IDG

Windows touchscreen tip #5: Take advantage of other basic taps and presses

There are many other useful ways to take advantage of a touchscreen. Obviously, you can use the it just like a mouse: Tap something to “click” it, or press and drag to move it around.

Whether you’re using a settings screen or filling out a form, you might go faster if you tap each checkbox with your finger rather than moving your cursor around with a touchpad.

You can combine the keyboard and the touchscreen, too. For example, when selecting multiple files in File Explorer, you can press and hold the Ctrl key while you tap each file in turn. That keyboard-plus-touchscreen method is faster to me than holding the Ctrl key while I use a laptop’s touchpad to click each file.

A touchscreen can also be useful if you’re streaming videos on your laptop. Rather than reach down and use the laptop’s trackpad to find playback controls, you can simply tap the on-screen playback controls.

“Scrubbing” through a video or audio file is another great use for a touchscreen: You can touch and hold the seek/back slider and move your finger back and forth to find the spot you want in your video. It’s much less awkward than using a laptop’s trackpad to do the same thing with your finger.

If you work with any sort of 3D modeling or CAD application, you might also find a touchscreen supremely useful for rotating models. There are many other uses, depending on the apps you rely on.

Laptop touchscreens aren’t going anywhere

Have I sold you on the productivity-boosting value of a touchscreen laptop? You often don’t have to go out of your way to have one in front of you and you might well wind up getting a touchscreen in the next laptop you buy.

Of course, if your current laptop supports pen input, its touchscreen is even more useful. A laptop with a digitizer for pens that supports a variety of pressure levels is a great tool when taking notes, marking up documents, drawing, and more.

There’s one last objection I hear often: People don’t want to smudge their screens with their fingers. But we’re smudging our phones with our fingers all day, anyway! Whether you’re cleaning your smartphone or your laptop’s screen, all you need is a simple microfiber cloth to keep it spotless.

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