Charms Bar

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

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…