In June 2021, Microsoft enabled a News and Weather widget (called “News and Interests“) on Windows 10’s taskbar. It shows weather, sports scores, news, and more at a glance. Here’s how to show, hide, and configure parts of the widget.
How to Get the News and Interests Widget in Windows 10
The News and Interests widget was enabled for all fully updated Windows 10 PCs on June 9, 2021. It will automatically appear on your taskbar. If your PC has the widget available and enabled, you’ll see it on the taskbar in the lower-right corner of the screen near the date and time.
By default, the widget will display the current temperature for your location and a very brief weather forecast in the taskbar itself. To open the widget fully, hover your mouse cursor over it (or click it).
If you don’t see the widget in your taskbar, you’ll need to update to the latest version of Windows.
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How to Use and Configure Widget Cards
The News and Interests widget starts out with different panels of information called “cards” that are enabled by default. These cards show sports scores, stock prices, weather forecasts, or local traffic. If you scroll down, you’ll also see news stories pulled automatically from the web.
If you want to see more information about weather, stocks, or the other cards, click the card itself. A page with more details will load on MSN.com in the Edge browser. (Even the widget’s weather card opens an MSN weather website instead of Windows 10’s built-in Weather app.)
If you want to configure how a card works—such as changing the location in the weather card or adding a ticker symbol to the finance card—click the menu button in the upper-right corner of the card panel. In the menu that appears, you’ll see the options for configuring the card.
The widget refreshes itself throughout the day, but if you ever want to refresh the card’s information manually, you can click the “Refresh” button (It looks like an arrow in a circle shape.) at the top of the widget window.
How to Disable Sports, Finance, Weather, or Traffic Cards
If you don’t want to see a certain widget card in particular, open the News widget and click the menu button (three dots in a circle) in the upper-right corner of the panel that you’d like to hide.
In the menu that appears, select “Hide Sports Card” (or whichever card it is). At release, there’s no way to disable the news feed portion of the widget.
You can also turn on and off different cards from a unified menu. To do so, click the three dots button in the upper-right corner of the widget window and select “Language and Content” from the menu.
The Edge browser will open and load an “Experience Settings” page on an MSN.com website that controls the preferences for the Windows 10 news widget. In the “Information Cards” section, flip the switches to “off” beside the cards that you want to hide. (You can also reenable hidden cards from this menu.)
After you make changes, open the widget in the taskbar again and click the circular “Refresh” button at the top.
Upon reload, the widget will reflect the settings that you made in the browser: Cards that you’ve hidden will disappear, and others that you’ve reenabled will show up again.
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How to Customize Your Taskbar Widget News Feed
If you’d like to influence which news Microsoft pulls from the web to show on your News and Interests widget, open the widget (by clicking it in the taskbar) and select “Manage Interests” at the top of the widget window.
A special MSN.com web page will open in your browser that allows you to select or deselect interests by subject. Available interests include Science, TV, NBA, and more.
After selecting your interests, open the widget and click the reload button (a circular arrow) at the top of the window. You’ll see more news related to the subjects that you selected.
If you don’t like certain news reports that you see in your news feed, you can hover over an individual news panel and click the “X” button in its upper-right corner.
The widget will then give you a choice between “Not interested in this story” (The widget will show fewer stories like this.), “Don’t like the source” (The widget will no longer show news from that publication.), or “Report an Issue” (where you can report offensive or misleading content).
Alternately, you can make similar changes by clicking the menu button (three dots in a circle) in the lower-right corner of the individual news card. There, you can “like” or “dislike” a story, ask the widget to hide news from this source, and more.
How to Hide the News and Weather Widget Completely
If you don’t want to see the news widget on your Windows 10 taskbar, right-click the taskbar and select “News and Interests,” and then “Turn Off” in the menu that appears.
In that same menu, you can also control options related to the widget, including selecting a smaller size for the widget in the taskbar (“Show Icon Only”) and making it so that you have to click the widget to open it (“Open on Hover”).
Hope you have nice weather. Good luck out there!
RELATED: How to Remove Weather and News From Windows 10’s Taskbar
