Years ago I read about how you can add folders to the Places bar and I never did anything about it because it was a really big pain that involved editing the registry. Yuck. The Places bar is the list of folders that appears along the side of the Save As dialog box. By default, you see History, My Documents, Desktop, Favorites and Network.
Now, it's well documented that I never save anything into the My Documents folder, so having it on the Places bar is a really big waste of space. I save all my project-related files in subdirectories that live under a folder called Proj. Okay, yeah, it's a cryptic folder name, but it's short for Projects and dates back from the days when you couldn't have long file folder names. (I can still find files from 1989...can you?)
In any case, these days with Office 2003, you can easily change the folders that appear in the Places bar. Then you can have one-click access to your most used folders from within Office. To change it, go into one of the Office 2003 applications, such as Microsoft Word. Now follow these steps:
1. Choose File|Save As to open the Save As dialog box.
2. Navigate to the folder on your hard disk that you want to add (in my case, it would be D:\proj).
3. When you've found your folder, make sure you click to highlight it and then choose Tools|Add to My Places. It appears in the Places Bar.
4. You can right-click your new place and rearrange your places using the Move Up and Move Down commands. If you set up a lot of places, you can use the Small Icons command to shrink them down.
Okay, that helps for Office, but what about other programs? Those programs that use the standard Windows XP Places bar can be switched using the Tweak UI PowerToy (which you can download for free from www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp). After you install Tweak UI, follow these steps:
1. Click the plus sign next to Common Dialogs. Then click Places Bar.
2. Click Custom Places Bar and type in the paths to the folders you want to appear.
You can only set up five places, but I can tell you that for me, not one of those folder was "My" anything. (Yes, it's the little things that make me happy.)
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