Sunday, June 1, 2003

Save time with the Places Bar

THIS WEEK'S POWERTIP

By Diane Poremsky

Newer versions of Office and Windows include a feature on the File->Open menu found on many applications, a column of shortcuts known as the Places Bar. By default, it contains five shortcuts for common folder locations, including Recent, My Documents, Desktop, My Network, and My Computer. You can add at least five more places to the bar when using earlier versions of Windows or Office and an unlimited number of places using Office 2003.

Why would you care about the Places Bar when you use Outlook? Because Outlook will always default to your My Documents folder when you save attachments. Your ability to change the default location in Outlook is limited to moving My Documents to another location, which affects all programs. It's much easier to add places to the Places Bar and change folders in one easy step.

To add a place to your Places Bar from Office XP or 2003:

  1. Open any Office Open or Save As file explorer window.
  2. Browse to the folder you want to put on the Places Bar. You can use local or network folders.
  3. Select the folder, but don't open it.
  4. Choose the Tools menu and then Add to "My Places" from the dropdown menu.
  5. Use Shift+Click or Ctrl+Click to select several folders and then choose Tools->Add to "My Places".

Adding places to the Places Bar in Office 2000 requires a registry edit. See http://www.poremsky.com/places_bar.htm for instructions,

Customize the look of the Places Bar by changing the icon size, renaming the icons, or rearranging the icons. Right click anywhere on the Places Bar and choose one of the options from the context menu.

Depending on the build of Office or Windows you use, the default places are unable to be removed from the places bar, but the Office explorer dialog is resizable and the Places Bar scrolls up and down, so you can find all the places you add. While Office 2003 supports an unlimited number of places, older versions have limits as low as ten. If you have too many folders, you can't find what you need anyway, so my personal limit is 10 top-level folder places for maximum usability. Otherwise, it's faster to browse subfolders than scroll the Places Bar.

If you want to remove a place, right click on the icon and choose Remove from the context menu. To delete all of the places, you can delete the UserDefinedPlaces key from the registry. The key is recreated when you add new places to your Places Bar.

The places on Outlook's Places Bar are the same across all office applications. Any places you add using Outlook are usable in Word and Excel, for example.

The places are stored in the registry, and you can export it to back it up. Look for:

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER&#92Software&#92Microsoft&#92Office&#9210.0&#92Common&#92Open Find&#92Places&#92UserDefinedPlaces.

For information on using the Places Bar in Windows 2000 and ME, see http://www.poremsky.com/windows2000_placesbar.htm. You'll find instructions and screenshots for all version of Office and Windows that support the Places Bar.

Of course, ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM before doing a Registry edit. Be careful and if you're not sure what you're doing, get help. Registry editing is potentially dangerous, so use appropriate caution.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.