PowerToys for Windows is still alive, and Microsoft has just released a new version (v0.86) that includes advanced embedding functionality, an updated interface, and a better organized layout to accommodate the increased number of supported features.

In case you are not familiar with this application, you should know that it is a set of external tools (aimed at intermediate and advanced users) that were released in Windows 95 and resurrected by Microsoft as external development and open source project hosted on GitHub. Its goal remains the same: to improve the system’s native applications, integrated Windows controls, its customization and general productivity in some tasks.

PowerToys for Windows 0.86

Microsoft has not stopped adding new features and improving the execution of this tool since it refreshed it for Windows 10. The first change we notice in version 0.86 is the redesign of its interface. There’s a new left panel that includes tabs for grouped tools, settings, and the control panel.

Microsoft is placing these and other design changes ahead of the need to adapt new features that have come to the application. If there were only half a dozen at launch, today there are many more and growing. Right in the control panel, we see a lot of enabled and disabled tools for better access, and the general settings of the application have been moved to the main tab. The tools themselves are divided into five categories: System Tools, Windows and Layout, Input/Output, File Management, and Advanced.

As for the new features, one stands out: Advanced embedding. You can access its window using the Win+Shift+V shortcut, which allows you to insert text as plain text, Markdown, or JSON code. It even allows you to connect to OpenAI and reformat text with AI or add content and then quickly insert it. To complete this feature, Microsoft has added “image to text” and “paste to file” functions.

The image to text function will also be extremely useful for digitizing old files, invoicing, translating or even taking notes. You can copy an image in a browser, for example, and paste it as “image to text”, so the tool extracts all the text from the image and pastes it where you want, all in two steps.

There’s also a quick “embed as .png” feature to speed up workflows involving many image conversions. Simply copy the image and paste it anywhere in File Explorer. Whatever format the image is in, it will be instantly converted to PNG. You can do the same with TXT or HTML. When you paste as TXT or HTML, the copied text will be pasted as these file formats with an automatically generated name.

The new version of PowerToys for Windows is like the previous ones free and open source. It is available on the GitHub project page or the official Microsoft Store and requires Windows 10 version 2004 or later and a computer with a 64-bit ARM or x86 processor.

Getting started is simple and only requires a download and installation so that the PowerToys icon appears in the system tray. The user interface shows all the individual tools installed, allows you to enable and disable them, and provides settings for each tool. There is also a link to a help document. Stopping the service is just a matter of right-clicking on the taskbar icon.