Group Policy Editor is the built-in tool that allows you to customize and change your system’s behavior and advanced settings. If you use it frequently, you can make your life easier by adding the group policy shortcut on the desktop. If needed, you can pin the same desktop shortcut to the taskbar or Start menu. Without any delay, let’s dive and learn the steps.
Create Group Policy Desktop Shortcut
Since group policy is just another application on Windows, you can use the “Create Shortcut” wizard to create the shortcut. Here’s how.
First, go to your desktop (you can press Ctrl key + D) and right-click on empty space to open the desktop context menu. Select the “New” > “Shortcut” option in the context menu. This will open the “Create Shortcut” wizard. In the empty field, type “gpedit.msc”, and then click the “Next” button.
Type “Group Policy Tool” as the name in the given field. This is the name of your shortcut. If you want something else as the name, type it in the name field. Press the “Finish” button.
That’s it. You’ve added the group policy shortcut on the desktop. By default, the shortcut will be where you opened the right-click context menu. If you want, you can move the shortcut to align with your other desktop icons.
Pin Group Policy to Taskbar
If you want an even quicker access, you can pin Group Policy to the taskbar. Once pinned, you can open the group policy tool with a single click no matter what you are doing on Windows. Here’s how to do it.
First, ensure you’ve created the desktop shortcut. Next, drag & drop the shortcut onto the taskbar. Ideally, you should drop it when you see the icon become bigger with the text “Link” on top of it.
Once you do that, the Group Policy application is pinned to the taskbar.
To remove it, right-click on the group policy icon and choose “Unpin from taskbar”.
Pin Group Policy to Start menu
Alternatively, you can also pin the group policy tool to the Start menu. To do that, you first need to add the group policy shortcut to the Start menu, and then use the “Pin to Start” option to pin it to the Start menu. Here’s how to do it.
First, ensure you’ve created the desktop shortcut for the group policy tool. Next, open the Run window (press Windows key + R), type shell:start menu in the empty text field, and press the Enter key on your keyboard to open the Start menu folder in the File Explorer. After that, you should copy the desktop shortcut and paste it into the Start menu folder (press Ctrl key + C to copy and Ctrl + V to paste).
Next, click on the Windows logo on the taskbar to open the Start menu. Search for the newly added shortcut. In this case, type “Group Policy Tool.” If you’ve used a different name for the shortcut, type that name in the Start menu. Once you see the appropriate result, select the “Pin to Start” option on the right panel.
As soon as click on the option, the group policy tool is pinned to the Start menu. You can see it immediately under the Pinned section at the top of the Start menu.
Conclusion
If you need quick and easy access to the group policy tool, creating the desktop shortcut is one of the easiest ways to open it. It eliminates the need to search for in the Start menu every time. If you need an even quicker access without minimizing all your applications, you can pin group policy to the taskbar or Start menu. Whatever method you choose to use, I hope this tutorial helps you. If you are stuck or need help, send an email, and I will try to help as much as possible.
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