Add Custom Widgets to Windows 11 Desktop Screen

Let’s check how to Add Custom Widgets to Windows 11 Desktop screens using the 3rd party application. It’s nice to have custom widgets options on Windows 11 desktop screens.

You can use the shortcut key WIN + W to launch the default Windows 11 widgets. But in this post, I’m going to share about Windows 11 custom widgets options.

Microsoft added the Widgets button to the taskbar by default. Windows 11 Widgets bring you closer to the information you want.

It helps to connect to the calendar, weather, local traffic, Microsoft To-Do lists, photos from OneDrive, sports, stock watchlist, and tips. More details on New Widgets Experience in Windows.

Home Screen Options	Use to
My feed	Where you can scroll through the contents
Watch	Watch more videos from the Microsoft site
Play	It allows you to play games
Add Widget	Add a new application to the Widget board
Refresh	It allows freshening up the Widget
Expand to Full view	It helps to Expand the Widget Screen
Settings	It allows Settings for the Widget

Windows 11 custom widgets will be on a desktop screen, and it’s not part of the default widgets. I think the custom features of this 3rd party widget make it useful.

Windows 11 was released on the 4th of Oct 2021, and we already have a custom widget solution!

• Windows 11 Family Safety Widget
• What is Windows 11 Entertainment widget?
• Windows 11 Version Numbers Build Numbers Major Minor Build Rev

NOTE! – Is these custom widgets option has the potential to replace Live Tiles? We don’t know yet. I felt this when I use Picture Widget.

Add Custom Widgets to Windows 11

Before going into the solution to add Custom Widgets to Windows 11 Desktop Screen, let’s check the end-user experience of custom widgets.

The following screenshot will give you an idea about custom widgets in Windows 11. The three boxes that you can see on my desktop are created using the custom widgets application.

The first one is the Custom widgets to show the current Date. The second widget is to show the current time on Windows 11 Desktop screen. I see this is useful when I have multiple screens and multiple desktop screens.

The third custom widget is a shortcut of an application. I don’t know how much useful this would be instead of using desktop shortcuts. I’m not going to use short cut of the application widgets yet.

The customization and sizing options of these custom widgets are very useful. Let’s perform some adjustments/customization with the Time and Date widgets to make it more useful.

You can learn more details about making customizations in the following section of the post.

You have many customization options like background colour, foreground colour, font size, different fonts, etc. are available to make widgets native to Windows 11 desktops. The following screenshot is just a simple example of this.

BeWidgets to Add Custom Widgets to Windows 11 Desktop Screen

The BeWidgets is the application you can install from Microsoft Store to get all these amazing custom widget options for Windows 11. I had had an issue with the Microsoft Store device limit when I tried to install this app.

Download Link – https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9NQ07FG50H2Q

You get a lot of customization options in this application. I’m not planning to cover this app’s end-to-end functionalities because it’s going to evolve very quickly. So there will be more out of box widgets options available sooner than later.

At this point, you only have 5 custom widgets options in Windows 11 using this BeWidgets application.

• Time Widget
• Date Widget
• Picture Widget
• Finance WIdget
• Application Shortcut Widget

Author

Anoop is Microsoft MVP! He is a Solution Architect in enterprise client management with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. E writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc…