How to Hide the Quick Action Buttons in Windows 10's Action Center

The Windows 10 Action Center includes a series of “Quick Actions.” These are touch-friendly buttons that let you quickly access common options and functions, such as switching to tablet mode, making a quick note, changing your network, and enabling airplane mode.

If you don’t use the Quick Action Buttons or to avoid accidentally selecting one of the Quick Action buttons, particularly when using Windows 10 on a touch-screen device, you can easily hide them using a registry hack.

By default, Windows 10 allows you to “Collapse” the list of Quick Actions, but this still displays the top four Actions. For those who want to hide Quick Actions completely, this can be accomplished with a quick trip to the Windows Registry.




Before we begin, it’s important to note that the Windows Registry is a crucial component of your PC’s operating system. Deleting or modifying the wrong Registry entries could result in corruption of your Windows installation and the loss of your personal data. Therefore, before making any changes to the Registry, make sure to back up your data and take care when modifying entries.

Here is how to backup registry key.  

1. From the Start menu, type regedit.exe in the search box, and then press Enter. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
   
2.    In Registry Editor, locate and click the registry key or subkey that you want to back up.
   
3.    Click File > Export.
   
4.    In the Export Registry File dialog box, select the location to which you want to save the backup copy, and then type a name for the backup file in the File name field.
   
5.    Click Save.
   

After you've backed up the information, you can restore it by double-clicking the backed up registry file.

1. To get started, first launch the Registry Editor by typing regedit into Start Menu.



2. Once the Registry Editor is opened navigate to the following location:



3. Double-click PinnedQuickActionSlotCount value on the right side of the screen.

4. You’ll see a “4” in the Value data box. This indicates the number of Quick Actions which are shown when the list is “Collapsed” in the Action Center. To hide all Quick Actions, change this value to “0” (zero). Click OK to save your change.



Now, log out of your user account and then back in, or restart Explorer.exe from the Task Manager. Once you’ve logged back in or restarted Explorer, open Action Center and you’ll see that all Quick Action icons are hidden when the list is “Collapsed.”



But don’t worry! All of your Quick Actions are still there, and can be accessed by clicking “Expand.”

When you want to you can restore the default behavior by returning to the location identified above in the Windows Registry and changing the Value data for the DWORD value back to “4.” Alternatively, you can change that value to customize the number of Quick Actions displayed when the list is “Collapsed” in Action Center. For example, changing the value to “2” will display only your first two Quick Action icons.