Why You Should Use Microsoft Edge Profiles

Microsoft Edge has a cool feature that allows you to create separate profiles to keep your data separated. You can link these profiles to access Microsoft Work or School accounts, or Microsoft Personal Accounts. Where this is most powerful is keeping your work streams separated. For example, keeping shortcuts for work or school separated from your personal accounts. In my case its about keeping clients isolated from each other. 

Create a new profile

Let's first start by creating a new profile. Creating a new profile is pretty easy. In Edge, click on the … and then choose Settings.

 

Once in settings, you can click on Add profile and set up how you want the profile to act. These profiles are separated from each other so you don't have to worry about things like saved passwords and cookies which are stored separately. 

Sign into your profile account and all of your shortcuts and saved passwords will synchronize across devices. 

To switch profiles go into settings, scroll down and select the profile you want and choose switch. 

Faster profile creation and switching

There is a quick way to create and access a profile. Instead of constantly having to go through the settings page. Create a desktop shortcut to the profile. 

Create a brand new profile via shortcut

First, right click on your desktop, choose new and then shortcut. 

In the desktop shortcut, use the following link

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --profile-directory="New profile"

Replace "New Profile" with the name of the new profile you want to create, for example "Work" or "School". Give the shortcut a meaningful name and save it. First time opening it will create a new profile and then you can quickly access the profile thereafter. 

Create a shortcut from an existing profile

You can also create a shortcut from an existing profile. You will first need to locate your edge profiles to get the proper name. The profiles are located here

C:\Users\<YourUserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\

replace <YourUserName> with the profile on your computer. In my case i have many profiles that are just called "Profile". 

Find the one you want and then create a new shortcut and use the folder name as the profile-directory name. For example, the command for Profile 1

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --profile-directory="Profile 1"

Now you have a quick and easy way to get to those unique profiles.