How to Add Shortcuts to Your Samsung Galaxy Tablet’s Home Screen

Samsung Galaxy S22 For Dummies

Don’t bother looking: You won’t find a something called a “shortcut” to add to the Samsung Galaxy tablet’s Home screen. Older versions of the Android operating system had such a feature. Today, you apply shortcut widgets instead.

For example, say you desire a Bluetooth shortcut icon on the Home screen. You can use that icon to turn the Bluetooth radio on or off. Here’s how to add that shortcut, which is really a widget:

Touch the Apps icon to visit the Apps screen.
Choose the Widgets category.
Choose the Settings Shortcut widget.

It’s way over there on the left, although not every tablet may have this widget.
Apply the widget to the Home screen.
Choose an action for the widget by selecting an item from the scrolling menu.

In this case, you could choose the Bluetooth item to create a Bluetooth settings shortcut on the Home screen.

The shortcut icon provides a direct link to a specific entry in the Settings app. So although the shortcut doesn’t turn something on or off, it quickly gets you to the screen that does so.

Another popular Home screen shortcut is a contact shortcut: Repeat Steps 1 and 2 but choose the Contact widget in Step 3. Continue working Step 4, but in Step 5 you choose a specific person from the tablet’s address book. To use the shortcut, touch the widget; you’ll see information about that contact.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.