How to automate tasks in Windows


Windows laptop against yellow background with small illustrations
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

If you find yourself repeating the same tasks in Windows over and over again, it’s likely you can automate the job, potentially saving you time and effort over weeks and months.

These tasks might encompass starting the day with a certain selection of programs and websites, for example, or renaming batches of files to match the same format. Or maybe you want to shut down your PC at the same time every day, or you need a bunch of images resized to the same standard (something I’ve been automating for a long time now).

There are lots of possibilities, and you’ve got a variety of tools to pick from. They all work in slightly different ways, so I will give you a sampling below, and you can choose the one that most closely matches what you’re...

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