Windows 10 is great, I have been running it for quite a while, starting with built 10040 or so while still an beta testing insider. I noticed a shortcoming this morning, how can you place a shortcut on the desktop to launch a Microsoft Store app, say for instance Word Mobile or Excel Mobile. I had pinned these apps to the start menu, but what if I wanted to have a way to get to office without actually pinning them to the start menu and then clicking start and then clicking the item? Pinning to the taskbar is not a viable option since they would take so much space there, so I wanted to pin them to the desktop. Well, I tried the way that was mentioned for Windows 8.1, but that didn’t work so well, I couldn’t get it to work, but I did find a way that worked for me.
It starts by creating a shortcut on the desktop, so right click the desktop and click New….Shortcut. In the target give it the following target “%windir%\explorer.exe shell:::{4234d49b-0245-4df3-b780-3893943456e1}” without the quotes of course, click next, then give it any name you want like “Metro Apps”. This creates a windows explorer view of all of the installed metro apps on your laptop/tablet. The next step is really quite easy, right click and drag the shortcut of Word to the desktop and let it go, then click create shortcut. Voila, you have a shortcut to a metro app on your desktop, which works like any other shortcut to any other desktop app you may have. You can even create a folder and place shortcuts in it so you could have a folder for Office and have the shortcuts to all of them in there.
Hope that helps some people out there.
Aug 052015