The Windows 8 Start screen let you pin apps as tiles, but pinning a single file or folder wasn’t straightforward. Start Screen Pinner was a free third-party utility that filled that gap: it let you pin almost anything to the Windows 8 Start screen. If you’d rather not install anything, Windows 8 also had a built-in workaround, which a Microsoft blog described. Both are covered below.
What Start Screen Pinner did
Start Screen Pinner gave you a small window from which you chose what to pin, such as a file, a folder or a library, and it created the Start screen tile for you. It was aimed at people who used the Start screen as their main launcher and wanted documents and folders next to their apps.
How to pin any file to the Windows 8 Start screen without a tool
A Microsoft blog post from November 2012 explains that the Start screen picks up shortcuts placed in the shared Start Menu folder. It works with executables, batch files, documents, images and more:
- Create a shortcut to the item you want to pin.
- Press Windows + R, paste %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs and press Enter.
- Copy the shortcut into that folder.
- Open the Start screen. The new tile should appear. If it doesn’t, right-click (or swipe up from the bottom) and open All apps to find it.
- Right-click the item in All apps and select Pin to Start.
You can then drag the tile to whichever group you like, just like any app tile.
Tips for pinning in Windows 8
- Rename the shortcut before you copy it, because the shortcut’s name is what you see on the tile.
- To remove a tile, right-click it and choose Unpin from Start.
- If you change your mind completely, delete the shortcut from the Programs folder as well, so it also leaves All apps.
Today: Windows 10 and 11
Windows 8 is no longer supported. In Windows 11, the simplest way to keep favorite programs one click away is the taskbar: search for the app, right-click it and select Pin to taskbar, or right-click the icon of a running app and pin it. Drag pinned icons to change their order, and right-click one and choose Unpin from taskbar to remove it.
If you still run Windows 8 for an old program, the manual method above needs no extra software. To reach apps and windows even faster, learn a few Windows keyboard shortcuts.
