Hey! Where’s the Start button?!?
To be honest, I don’t really care. But, it would seem from some of the complaints and backlash against the lack of a Start button in Windows 8 that the operating system is just useless without it. For Day 12 of the 30 Days with Surface Pro series, I examine the Charms Bar, which basically replaces the functionality of the Start button.
While it may be a tad inconvenient to learn to swipe from the right (or hover the mouse cursor at the upper right of the display) to access the Charms Bar rather than clicking on a button at the bottom left of the display, it takes all of about two minutes to get used to. Once you familiarize yourself with the Charms Bar, you’ll soon forget all about the…what was that? Oh, right! The Start button.
Windows 8 has five charms on the Charms Bar: Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. From those five charms you can do pretty much everything you could so with the Start button in previous versions of Windows, and everything you need to do in order to effectively use a Surface Pro (or Windows 8 in general).
Read Surface Pro, Day 12: Getting to know the Charms Bar for more details of what each of the charms on the Charms Bar does, and my experience using the Charms Bar to work with Windows 8 on a Surface Pro tablet.
