Windows / Customizing Your Open Files Places Bar
< Getting Back the Folders Sidebar | Working With Windows | Windows Registry Tweaks > Customizing Your Open Files Places BarAs of Windows 2000 (and thus it is in XP), Microsoft added a feature to the Open File dialog —- the Places Bar, which is the vertical toolbar that appears on the left side of the window to let you select a frequently visited folder. As you can see in Figure 1, the Places Bar contains buttons to take the user directly to five folders: My Recent Documents, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places. If those are not the places you use most commonly, you can do something about it. NOTE: Following this procedure will not affect the Open File dialogs in Office XP or 2003. Those are special. See Microsoft Office Tips and Tricks for information on customizing the Places Bar there. Figure 1. The Open File dialog with the default Places Bar Using Tweak UI (Windows XP)The easiest way to modify what is available in your Places Bar is to use the Tweak UI XP Powertoy. It is available for free from the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP page. Simply download the Figure 2. Initial Places Bar configuration settings Click on “Custom places bar” and you can specify up to five locations to be shown. If you clicked Apply or OK without changing any of the five “<none>” choices, your Places Bar would be empty (see Figure 3). Note that the Places Bar is still shown in an Open File dialog even though it is empty; if you don’t want a Places Bar at all, select “Hide places bar”. Figure 3. The Open File dialog with an empty Places Bar You can select from standard locations using the drop down selector; or you can simply type in the full folder name (remember to include the disk information, e.g. “C:\My folder\My subfolder”) for each position in the Places Bar. It has been reported that the top place can handle only 30 characters, while the remaining ones can handle at least 60 characters. Figure 4 shows the configuration I wanted at work, and Figure 5 shows the Open File dialog with my customized Places Bar. Note that the mapped network drives (X: and Z:) display their full description in the Places Bar, not simply “X:” and “Z:”. I would rather see “X:” and “Z:” rather than the bizarre names I tried to avoid needing to remember by mapping the drives in the first place; but I don’t know how to change it. Figure 4. My Places Bar configuration settings Figure 5. The Open File dialog with my customized Places Bar Editing the Registry (Windows XP)The more direct way to modify what is available in your Places Bar is to use the Registry Editor. Editing your Registry can be dangerous, if you screw something up, you may not be able to boot Windows anymore; so don’t screw anything up! If you are not comfortable taking the risk of manually editing the Registry, then you either live with the Places Bar Windows gives you, or you use the Tweak UI Powertoy. For information on how to run the Registry Editor, see Windows Registry Tweaks. Find the key Figure 6. Find the desired Policies key in the Registry Editor Figure 7. Create the ComDlg key Select the Figure 8. Creating a String Value Figure 9. Entering the value for the new String Value If you wish to specify a special destination, like My Computer or My Documents, you need to create a DWORD Value instead. The table below indicates the value you need to enter for the special destinations that Windows defines. Make sure you set the Base to Decimal when you enter the value (as shown in Figure 10).
Figure 10. Entering the value for the new DWORD Value You should probably not leave a gap by skipping a number for the As soon as you define a < Getting Back the Folders Sidebar | Working With Windows | Windows Registry Tweaks > |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
loaded 2024-10-06 21:56:52 • last modified 2018-08-15 17:10:28 |