I know that moving the mouse to various corners on the desktop view of Win 8.1 brings up things like the Charms Bar and the Metro screen, but up until today, I never knew that putting the mouse pointer exactly to the right of the time indicator in the lower right corner of the system tray would bring up the desktop when other windows are open on the screen.
I think that I may have read about that supposedly being able to happen, but I guess that when I tried it out in the past, I didn't drop the pointer down far enough and only the Charms Bar would appear. What I've been doing up to this point is right-clicking on the taskbar and clicking on "Show the desktop". It's been a PITA, so today I was looking for a way to pin a desktop icon onto the taskbar.
On Vista, I had a desktop icon on the taskbar immediately right of the Start button, and apparently from what I've now read, on Win 7 that was changed to a blank space to the left of the time, but indicated by a separator line. That line doesn't show up on Win 8.1 unless you mouse over it, so it's virtually hidden.
Learn something new everyday....