Charms Bar

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What Does Charms Bar Mean?

The Charms bar is a systems-wide toolbar available in Windows 8 that houses five important applications, services and administrative utilities. The Charms bar is a vertical toolbar, found on the right-hand side of the screen, and includes search, share, start, devices and settings buttons by default or when in desktop mode. At the same time this bar appears, a notification panel appears from the left side displaying the current time and date, Internet connection and battery status.

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Techopedia Explains Charms Bar

The Charms bar can be accessed by dragging the mouse cursor to the top right or bottom corner, pressing Windows + C or by swiping from the right on touch-enabled devices. When activated, the Charms bar contains 5 different buttons; Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings which enables a user to search the entire computer or device, search specifically in an application, and switch between the tiled menu, desktop mode and the basic settings menu.

When being accessed within an application, the Charms bar displays application-specific administrative settings and configuration options.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.