You can in 2 ways.
First the home screen of most laptops are the desktop unless you have a touchscreen laptop and you have changed it to be in tablet mode.
The first way you can install app is to use the windows store. This is like the google play store but for windows.
The second is that you install a program like Microsoft office and set a shortcut to that program so that you can find it. Most programs will give you an option if you want to do this.