PC Manager brings “Circle to Act” to Windows
One more reason to try PC Manager
Credit: Pankil Shah / MakeUseOf
If you haven’t heard of PC Manager, here’s the short version. It’s a free tool Microsoft introduced in 2022 to help you keep old or underpowered PCs running smoothly. It offers a one-click boost feature that lets you free up RAM by stopping unwanted background processes and cleaning up temporary files. Microsoft has improved PC Manager over the years to make it a proper all-in-one maintenance tool while also adding useful extras to it.
Microsoft has been pushing AI into every corner of Windows lately, and PC Manager hasn’t escaped that trend. The app now ships with a dedicated "AI Tools" section, which is something I only noticed while writing about PC Manager last month.
One tool that caught my attention was Circle to Act. The name reminds you of Android’s Circle to Search, and it works similarly too. Instead of taking a regular screenshot and using the tools inside Snipping Tool, Circle to Act lets you act directly on what’s on your screen.
Microsoft has also offers something similar called Click to Do, which is way more advanced but exclusive to Copilot+ PCs. Circle to Act is different because it’s powered by PC Manager, meaning it works on any Windows 11 PC.
Circle to Act lets you act on anything on the screen
It can do some useful stuff
Accessing Circle to Act is quick and easy. You can access it from PC Manager’s AI Tools tab or even add its shortcut to PC Manager’s floating toolbar. My favorite way, though, is using the shortcut — Ctrl + Shift + A. It’s easy to remember because it’s similar to Snipping Tool’s Ctrl + Shift + S shortcut. And if that combo doesn’t work for you, you can also change it.
Once you trigger it, it opens a screenshot-like tool so you can capture the area you want to work with. You can also press the Alt key to switch the selection mode to auto-detect window. After you’ve captured something, you’ll see a toolbar showing shortcuts to add shapes, drop-in text boxes, slap stickers, and draw. You can then copy the screenshot to the clipboard or save it as an image.
There’s also the smarter stuff. Circle to Act comes with built-in OCR, which is handy if you’re looking at an image or a site that doesn’t allow selecting text. Right next to it is the translation option in case you want to grab a text in another language and have it converted on the spot.
My favorite Circle to Act feature, though, is Smart Copy. It lets me select any data I’m looking at and instantly paste it into a new Excel file. So if I'm looking at a table on screen, I can trigger Circle to Act and transfer it straight into an Excel spreadsheet. This works the same way for a PowerPoint presentation too.
It’s not a simple copy-and-paste tool, either. Circle to Act first analyzes the content before transferring it. So if you select an image, for instance, and ask it to create a spreadsheet, it simply won’t work.
And I’m not done yet. There’s another tool that makes Circle to Act worth using, which is Pin to desktop. Once you’ve captured an image or a text section, you can click the Pin icon to keep it on your desktop. This is great if you want to keep a reference handy while working on something else.
I hope Microsoft adds this one thing to Circle to Act
As impressive as Circle to Act is, there’s one gap that keeps bugging me, and that’s the lack of reverse image search. This is exactly what makes Android’s Circle to Search so useful. If Microsoft could add that to the Circle to Act toolbar, it’d make the tool even more useful.
To be fair, PC Manager’s AI Tools tab already includes an Image Search option. The only problem is that clicking it takes you to Bing Image Search on the web, which is not ideal. What we’d all really love is the option to circle almost anything on our screen — a product, a logo, a random object in a photo — and find out what it is without ever opening a browser tab.
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