shotglassHey, welcome back to another Windows 10 tips blog post.  I hope you read my last post, Windows 10 Shots – Streaming and Cast to Device.

I have mentioned in previous posts, with most shots, after about a handful, things will start to get a little hazy.  But, with Windows 10 Shots (this new series of posts), the hope would be that the opposite would happen.  That clarity and insight into the highly anticipated release would free your mind to great new features and power of Windows 10.

Have you ever been in a meeting presenting, demo-ing or even pitching a great idea to your business, when a notification quickly pops up on your screen from a colleague or friend talking about the exciting bender the two of you are going to have later that night?   Suddenly, your face turns red and you frantically try to close the notification.  In some cases, you accidentally click the link in the notification and an inappropriate website/application comes up to display in all of its glory to all those participating in the meeting?  Well, hopefully that scenario, if it hasn’t already, will never happen to you.

With Windows 10, there are a couple of things that you can do to keep those pesky notifications from popping up on your screen during presentations or odd hours of the night.  (There is nothing like hearing your computer binging and bonging all night long with notifications.)

PowerPoint

If you use PowerPoint for your demos, or presentations, there is a really nice feature built in to Windows 10 that will automatically disable notifications while you are presenting.  To turn on this setting, follow the steps below:

  1. Open Settings. Simply select the Windows Key and type Settings.stop1
  2. Select System. Click on the System Icon from the Settings screen.stop2
  3. Select Notifications & Actions. From the tab menu on the left, select Notifications & Actions.stop3
  4. Select Hide Notifications. Scroll down into the Notifications section and to the right, and turn on the Hide notifications while presenting.stop4

 

Now, while you are presenting with PowerPoint, notifications won’t disturb your presentation mojo.  Pretty nice huh?

Quite Hours

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes it is nice to not have notifications waking you up at night.  Windows 10 has a quiet hour’s option that will turn off all notification between 12am and 6am.  To turn quiet hours on, all you have to do is…

  1. Open Action Center by clicking on the icon in the task bar.stop5
  2. Select Quiet Hours.stop6
  3. That’s it!!

The only bummer about this feature is that you can’t currently set the quiet hour times.  It would be nice it Microsoft would allow you to create sets of times that you notifications would be turned off.  Maybe in the upcoming Redstone release we will be able to customize this option more.  (fingers crossed)