The first thing you notice after installing the April 2018 update for Windows 10 is the appearance of a new button on the desktop taskbar, which is located next to the search bar and has the icon made of squares and a line with a dot in the mess. That is the new icon of the " Task View " button (or Task View in English), which in Windows 10 allows you to see on the screen what programs and applications are open.
After the April 2018 update, the Activity Viewer screen has changed and has become a Timeline that not only shows the programs open on the PC at the moment, but also functions as a activity history, to review which programs and which applications have been used in the past days.
Since it is the most significant change in Windows 10 after the April update and given its importance (and also its impact from the point of view of privacy), it is worth examining what it is used for and how to use the Timeline function or activity history, in Windows 10.
Windows 10 Activity History is a new version of the Activity View feature.
Prior to this update, the Task View was nothing more than an improvement of the Switcher between Windows windows.
Pressing the Alt-Tab keys together opens the switcher to switch from one window to another, while with the Windows-Tab keys the Activity View was opened which was practically the same, with the difference, compared to Windows 7 and 8, to be able to open other virtual desktops as separate workspaces or to create groups of open programs.
Now, in Windows 10, clicking the activity view button or pressing the Windows-Tab keys together opens the activity history or Timeline, which shows the windows open now and then, scrolling down also past activities, with at the top buttons to create new virtual desktops.
In the activity history, the open and processed documents, the app tabs previously used and then also the web pages visited appear in a temporal sequence, as if it were a browser history, which applies to everything you do on your PC.
Windows will also try to be smart by analyzing how these apps, documents and web pages are used together, to group them into Activities .
This history of Windows 10 is like an evolution of the function of recent apps, much smarter and more organized and, above all, with the ability to quickly pick up where you left off.
By pressing, in fact, on a document or a web page of the history, you will return to that file or that website to continue what was being done a few days or a few hours ago.
The order of the history is divided by the various days and shows the main activities of a maximum period of 30 days.
By pressing on the date of a day it is possible to go into detail to review what has been done hour by hour.
Another specialty of this history is that if you activate the synchronization option for the Microsoft account in use, you can view the activities performed on other Windows 10 computers on the PC and also the web pages opened by the mobile phone when using Microsoft applications (such as Edge browser or the Bing search engine).
The activity history works particularly well with Word, Excel and PDF files, with the image and photo viewer, with Microsoft programs and services, especially Microsoft Office and OneDrive, Edge and Bing.
From 2019, thanks to an extension, it is also possible to see the Chrome history within the Windows 10 Timeline .
For stronger effectiveness and to become truly useful, you will have to wait for other developers to update their programs and applications to integrate into the Timeline.
Turn off activity history
Those who are concerned about privacy, for those who use a PC shared with other people, may prefer to disable this function of the activity history so that the sites visited, the documents processed are not stored.
To disable the history of Windows 10 you need to open the Start menu, go to Settings and then press on Privacy> Activity history and turn off the two switches, that of the activity log for this PC (which in fact deactivates the activity history in Windows 10) and the one to synchronize the activities of this PC on the cloud.
Even after turning off activity collection, Windows will still show the activities previously collected in the Timeline, including also the activities of other PCs if cloud synchronization was activated.
To prevent activities from synchronizing with your PC, you must turn off the switch next to the Microsoft account, under the Show activities from account section . any Microsoft account displayed in " Show activity from accounts " on the " Disable " setting.
To remove all existing activities from the Timeline, click on the "Clear" button under "Clear Activity History".
As far as privacy is concerned, if synchronization has been activated on a Microsoft account, it is also advisable to check and possibly delete the various usage histories of Microsoft services .
These histories are grouped together in a special Microsoft account web page reachable from this address //account.microsoft.com/privacy/.
The Product and Service Activities section is related to the Windows 10 Timeline.
Another option related to activity history is found in Settings> System> Multitasking and allows you to disable the suggestions in the Timeline, which in fact would be another name to call the Timeline.
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