Perhaps a silly post, but since the removal of the start menu in Windows 8, there are no more direct ways to shut down your computer. Right now, you have to go through the Charms menu → Settings → Power, and then choose to shut down or restart your computer, making it more of a hassle to turn it off (even worse than pressing Start to stop your computer).
I've gathered several methods and workaround to make the shutdown/restart options a bit more accessible. These are listed in this article. A lot of things I got from other posts on the internet, others I figured out myself.

Like I said earlier, the current way to exit Windows.

From your desktop, call up the Charms menu; that's th  ...