I've made it no secret that I adore Microsoft's PowerToys suite for Windows 11 PCs. It adds so many features that I consider essential now, such as FancyZones, which is my personal favorite. But PowerToys isn't just one tool, and there's another incredibly useful feature I love in there. And it's one that pairs nicely with FancyZones, too.

It's called PowerToys Workspaces, and it's a huge productivity boost for anyone who needs to work across multiple apps and windows. If you're not using it yet, you should be, and here's why.

Launch all your apps

Start working right away

Remember when foldable phones started coming out, and one of the big features that was designed to take advantage of the larger screen was the ability to launch multiple apps at once? I distinctly remember brands like Samsung advertising this capability to make the bigger screen more useful. Isn't it weird that computers, which have much larger screens than even the largest foldable phones, don't have this feature?

Well, with PowerToys Workspaces, they do. Using this feature, you can take a snapshot of all your open apps at any given time, and they will be recorded and saved as a workspace. Then, when you start work again the next day, you can launch the entire workspace, so your apps all open in one go.

And, because you can create multiple workspaces, this also makes it easy to switch between different contexts. Maybe you work as a graphic designer and video producer, so you might want a workspace with Photoshop and Illustrator, but then have a separate workspace for something like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. You can have as many workspaces as you need for the different workloads you handle throughout your day.

Everything in the right place

A great pairing for FancyZones

Opening all your apps in one go is already a major benefit, but PowerToys Workspaces doesn't leave it at that — it also memorizes where your apps are on-screen. When you create a new workspace, you're given the opportunity to fully adjust your layout before capturing it, so you can have every window in the exact right position — including minimized windows — to start off your workday. You also don't have to close apps you don't need in the workspace; you can always edit the workspace to only include the things you actually want to launch.

This particular feature makes PowerToys Workspaces a fantastic pairing for FancyZones, another one of my favorite tools. See, FancyZones makes it very easy to set up the perfect screen layout, and it's especially useful on very large screens. You can make your setup look exactly how you want it to, dividing the screen into multiple zones and easily snapping windows into each zone so everything is where you need it. While it is much easier to do this using FancyZones, it's even easier if you don't have to do it every time. Simply snap all the windows into the area where you want them to be, and capture the layout with Workspaces. Next time, you can launch the workspace with the perfect layout right from the get-go.

It's also worth highlighting another cool feature that's labeled "move existing windows". This makes it so that if you already launched one or more of the apps in a workspace, those app windows will be resized and moved into the appropriate space in the layout you saved, instead of opening a new window. If you ever forget to launch a workspace, or you only need it halfway through the day, you don't have to worry about duplicate apps opening when you do launch it.

One big feature is missing

Launching workspaces should be a bit easier

Workspaces is a relatively simple tool and works nearly perfectly, but if I had to point out a flaw, it's that it should be easier to launch a workspace. The tool does give you an option to create a desktop shortcut for a given workspace, but in the spirit of making things as snappy as possible, I think it would make perfect sense if Workspaces integrated with other PowerToys tools, specifically PowerToys Run or Command Palette.

PowerToys Run can open the Workspaces Editor window, but then you still need to use said window to launch the workspace you want. It would make a ton of sense if each workspace was accessible directly through the launcher with a dedicated shortcut, so you could instantly launch all your apps using just the keyboard and without having to look at the desktop. I'm just a fan of using the keyboard for everything, so I wish that was made easier here.

Since Microsoft is still building up Command Palette, I'm hopeful this is something that's in the works, but for now, this does hold it back from being a perfect execution.

PowerToys Workspaces is excellent

My only complaint about PowerToys Workspaces is arguably a very minor one, because otherwise, this tool is fantastic. It's not a complex feature, but simply being able to launch all the apps you need in one go, while opening them in the specific area of the screen you want, makes this incredibly helpful. It becomes much easier to start a workday or a project, so you can get more done with less waiting, which can only ever be a good thing, and I wish it was just part of Windows itself. For now, if you haven't installed PowerToys yet, you can check it out below.