I’m a geek, I admit it. 

Since Windows 3.1 I have waited impatiently for each new version to come out.  Heck, when Windows 7 was released I had been too excited to sleep very well the night before it was released.  And I tried Windows 10 beta way, way before it was finished and ready for the masses, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

At least for a while – it certainly has its fair share of issues, annoyances, bugs, and problems; so I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Windows 10, which is a story for another day.

So when I got to try Windows 11 I was looking forward to (hopefully some of) those annoyances being taken care of.

This posting isn’t about whether those annoyances were taken care of, or about Windows 11 in general nor the philosophies of Microsoft when it comes to Windows, or whether Windows 11 is good or bad or whatever, etc; but concentrates on one aspect – the lack of the ability to group programs in the Windows 11 Start Menu.  I’m not sure exactly what went into Microsoft’s decision to eliminate the ability to group programs in the Windows Start Menu.

It’s an issue that ranges from a non-issue for many to a major annoyance for others.  In some cases it’s a deal-breaker.

I mean, what were they thinking?  There’s a certain amount of streamlining in Windows 11 and this is likely a part of that.  But for me, it seems like it is more of a dumbing-down, a subtracting of a feature that makes some of us less productive in Windows 11, and should have been an option.

So is it a deal-breaker for me, personally?  No, but it is a big annoyance.  There are many workarounds – some involving replacing the Start Menu with an after-market piece of software.  But I’m not fond of adding more software that is running all of the time just to augment something that is already part of the system.

I did try many of these Start menu replacements and most worked extremely well, didn’t really seem to slow anything down, especially on my awesome HP Omen desktop gaming computer.  But still – Windows 11 has a perfectly fine Start Menu; if it just had the ability to group programs and files.

Also, there doesn’t seem to be the ability to add shortcuts to non-programs in the Start Menu.  You can’t right-click on a spreadsheet file, say, and pin it to the Start Menu.  You can’t even trick it into doing so (at least not that I have found).  And you can’t add URL links either.  I miss both of these abilities too.

I got to thinking that all I needed to fix these problems was a program that the Start would access and would act as a program group.

I thought perhaps I would write one myself, but it’s been quite a few years since I have written anything significant for Windows.  A few things here and there but most of my coding involves Internet-related languages so I am terribly rusty and it would take me a heck of a long time to implement exactly what I needed.

But thinking back to my days of using docks in Windows, like RocketDock (which, BTW, also works fine on Windows 11) – I remembered that there was a stackable program group addon.  And also that the author or someone made a standalone version that could be called from a link or shortcut anywhere, including in the Start Menu.  Of course, this was on Windows XP and then Windows 7.

That would do the trick though, if it were still compatible with Windows 11.  The standalone could be accessed, would pop up and allow any program, data file, or link to be clicked, and once it was clicked the standalone grouping program would silently close and open the shortcut, link, or file.

It was just a matter of finding what it was called.  I jumped on my home/office network and perused my backups, fortunately I have backups from a hell of a long time back and all organized and indexed.  A quick keyword search for “dock” found the associated program.

The program was called StandaloneStack, once I found the name I set out to find if there was a newer version to try, since the version I had worked fine after a quick initial test-  but was quite old.

I found the author’s site right away – but there was no date on the StandaloneStack 2 website from the author, Christian Salmon.  When you go to download the program it mentions Windows XP/Vista/7 so I am guessing it has not been updated in a long, LONG time and seemed to be the exact version I had from many years back.

Apparently, it was based on the original stack program that was made for RocketDock, and this author made the standalone version of it that could operate without the RocketDock program.  

You can download the last version off the author’s website.

I set out and messed around with it a bit more and surprisingly it worked perfectly, and quite well.  Usually, it is super-fast to pop up, once in a while it may not load quite as fast as other times but that is seldom.  It does seem to depend on how many programs you are packing into it if you are running on a slower computer, I’ve found and/or what else you are doing on your computer even if it is fast.

So let me take you through the process of setting it up.  And keep in mind here – there are a couple of different ways of doing it, I’ll show you the way I did it but I imagine others will find other ways, tweaks, and methods of doing it.

Also, a note for the rest of this blog post – I use the terms ‘folder’ and ‘directory’ interchangeably.  They are the same.

In addition keep in mind that this program was made quite a number of years ago, and not for Windows 11 – I’ve tried it on a number of Windows 11 computers and it works fine but it’s possible it may not work for you.  And it does have some idiosyncrasies when setting up the stacks – once you do have them set up it seems to work flawlessly. 

And 

Firstly download the StandaloneStack 2 program – at this link.

Scan it with an anti-virus program if you wish, but I have scanned it by a total of three antivirus programs and the files are safe.

Open the archive – either in the native Windows File Manager or Winzip or 7-zip or whatever you are using to open zipped archives.  Just try to make sure you keep the integrity of the folders included in the archive, if possible.  It generally runs fine without them actually, but if you want to use some of the (kind of old) features you probably want to extract the directories included in it intact. 

Anyway, extract them to a place on your hard drive where you are going to access the folder and run the program to set the program groups/stacks up.  As you can see in the screenshot below I put it into my Documents directory, but it will run from nearly anywhere.

But if you try to put it in Program Files or Program Files (X64) you may have some issues.  It will work fine, but you must run it with administrator privileges every time you set up a stack.  So I put it in Documents where it doesn’t require the user to do that each time.

Once you have extracted it to its new home in a hard drive folder/directory, you will need to create a program group or use an existing one program group (if you had created them in Windows 10, say), or point to a directory on your hard drive of some type.

You can point to a directory anywhere on your computer, including directories of files that may change as needed.  These will update dynamically (as long as you don’t have the “Keep in memory when stack is closed…” option selected – see below).  Very handy and useful, especially if you are working with changing files – no matter what type they are, as long as they have an association in Windows.

For this example though, I am going to create a more static directory to hold shortcuts, right in the original Windows Start Menu program groups.

I did have leftover program groups from upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 that still resided in the Windows directory structure, even though Windows 11 Start Menu can not access these as groups, nor can it search for them specifically nor, seemingly, do anything else with them – even though they are still there.  Windows 11 can access anything in these groups of course.

These groups also can be made up of various installation’s automatic install procedures which create program groups in the Start Menu.  Again, Windows 11 doesn’t let you see these groups, just the individual programs inside them, via the Start Menu search.

Your Start Menu items are actually stored in a couple of different places.  Of note here – you may not be able to see the Start menu directory in File Explorer unless you turn on File Explorer’s options for showing hidden system directories and files.  Find these options by clicking the three dots in File Manager up near the middle top, and then select Options and then the second tab – View.  Then select ‘Show hidden files, folders, or drives’.

So if you are going to point your stack to something besides a Start Menu group then you can skip ahead a bit.

If you are following along my example then continue on – to find your Start Menu locations they are as follows (and there are indeed two locations):

C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\ – These are the Start Menu programs that are installed for specific users, where %Username% is the name of the user account you are currently using.

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\ – These are the programs installed for all users.

So organizing grouping by hand in the STart Menu directories directly can be a little challenging if you are not familiar with how Windows does this, but basically what I did was pick one of these above locations to create my groups and also to use some of my existing grouping left-over from Windows 10, but for this example I am just creating a new group.  Again, if you already had your stuff grouped pretty well in Windows 10 it should still be distributed in groups in the above directories.

I picked C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs as the place to create my example grouping.

Here you can see I created a Multimedia group.  Just right-click somewhere in the right pane of File Manager and select “New” and then “Folder” and name it what you wish.

Now just start copying or moving shortcuts into it, if you are following along the example then you want to move shortcuts from other places in your Start Menu to this Multimedia directory. 

To do things more efficiently and quickly I opened multiple File Manager windows; one being the Multimedia directory I just created, another File Manager showing ‘C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs’ directory, and another File Manager showing the ‘C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs’ directory.  

Next I copied/dragged all files from each open Start Menu directory file manager window into the Multimedia directory in the other open File Manager window.  

You will likely need to open and close and peruse various directories in each File Manager Window to find the shortcuts you want.  It may take a little searching around to find everything, and you may possibly even need to create new shortcuts in your Multimedia directory File Manager window, if you can’t find something; by going directly to a program’s install folder and creating a shortcut and dragging it over.

You of course can try a few here and then go back and add more as needed later if you wish.  Also, to re-iterate – you can also add shortcuts to files of pretty much any type, or webpage URL’s, batch files, etc.  Whatever – they will run in a stack.

Once you have your directory (in my case the Multimedia directory) filled with the programs that you want you are ready to set up a group, or ‘stack’.

Now go to where you extracted your StandaloneStacks directory, in my case it was in the Documents directory.  Open up “StandaloneStack2.exe”.

Note here; in my screenshot below the directory shows a ‘standalonestack.ini’ in the list – if you have not run the program yet this will not be shown.  And an additional note for later – you can manually edit this INI file with a text editor to change options by hand.  I’ll get to some more about that later.

Once it has loaded go down to “Options” and unclick “Keep in memory when stack is closed…”

You could leave this checked, if you have any modern computer it will be fine running in the background for faster speed.  But it loads so fast anyway, at least on my computer, so I feel that this is unnecessary.  You can always change it later for each individual stack.

A note here, I am skipping over the other default options here.  You can go back and set these as needed, now or later, and you can set the same options individually for each stack you create also.  So the defaults will be carried over when you create a new stack, yet you can edit each stack’s options individually as needed, whenever you wish; by selecting the “Overide default Setting” option at the top of each stack.

Now, go down to “New Stack”. 

Name your stack beside “Stack name:”.  This will show up under the “My Stacks” each time you load the StandaloneStack2.exe, for editing and tweaking and will be the name of your stack in the Windows 11 Start Menu (though you can rename it there if you wish).  Unfortunately, you can not rename it in the StandaloneStack program itself once you create it. 

BUT, you can use a text editor to open ‘standalonestack.ini” itself and edit any instances of the name there (there will likely be multiple instances of that stack name).  In fact, you can manually edit any options right in the INI file instead of using the program, or in addition to it.

Next click the three dots beside “Path:” and navigate to the directory that contains the group/stack you want to create.  In my case it was ‘C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Multimedia’.

I selected ‘Grid’ as the visual display of the group but there is also ‘Stack’ (the default).  Below are examples of both – and you can also have a Stack automatically change to a Grid depending on how many files are in the directory. 

Now you can mess with the settings or leave them as-is for now, you can always go back and edit them by re-running ‘standalinestack2.exe’.  Once ready click the “Create Stack” button.

Now you are ready to save the stack in a place where you can designate Windows 11 to pint it to the Start Menu.

Click the “Create shortcut” button and save it somewhere like the desktop.  On my computers I could not save it directly to the Start Menu directory, due to a Windows security message, so I saved it to the Desktop first, then moved it to either ‘C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs’ or ‘C:\Users\%%Username%%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs’.  It doesn’t seem to matter which place you save it, though if you have multiple users you may want to save it in the ProgramData directory if you want everyone to have access to it.

If you want to be able to save it directly to the Start Menu without saving it somewhere, like the Desktop, first then you can run ‘StandaloneStack2.exe’ with Administrator privileges instead of just clicking on it (right-click on ‘StandaloneStack2.exe’ and select “Run as administrator”).

Once you have the stack in your Start Menu right-click on it and select ‘Pin to Start Menu’.

You should be all set.  Now click your Start Menu and you should be able to find the stack you created.  Give it a try, and also drag it to where you want it to show up in your Start Menu.

Here are examples of the Stack layout and the Grid Layout.

One idiosyncrasy here is the Stack layout didn’t always display the entire group because it unrolled up past the screen edge, so you may have to mess with the offset and such.  I like the Grid much better, and the Grid also doesn’t have this issue.  The problem here is one you have to watch for when setting up your stacks – changing options sometimes isn’t reflected immediately.  And sometimes you have to delete the stack in the place where you saved it and recreate it.  As I said – this location problem doesn’t crop up with the Grid layout, though you can change its pop-out location too.

Now you can go back to the ‘StandaloneStack2.exe’ and mess around with the other settings.  As I said above – sometimes you may find that you settings are not making any changes so you may have to delete the Stack you created in your Start Menu and re-save it in StandaloneStack2.  Worst-case scenario if nothing else works or a stack is not working right at all delete the stack directly in StandaloneStack2 and create a new one.

Another thing that I want to reiterate is that there are different variations of setting this up which will work fine.  And also to note, again, that this gives you back – in a way – the ability to add files and links to the Start menu in addition to program shortcuts.  Create URL links, access files, directories that change, etc.  Pretty much anything.  You now have the ability to do those things in Windows 11.

So there you go – a roundabout way of adding grouping to your Windows 11 Start Menu.  It may seem a bit complicated at first but once you set a few stacks up and mess with the settings it will seem pretty straightforward.  

As time goes on I will tweak this post a bit here and there, and if you have any questions or helpful suggestions and tweaks please post in the comments.

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