If you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, you probably have accumulated quite a few desktop shortcuts. Those little shortcut icons on your screen can multiply like bunnies. Sometimes this icon overload means it can be difficult to find the shortcut you want. To solve the problem, you can take a couple of approaches. My husband, for example, carefully arranges his icons, so that he has all his shortcut icons organized into groups.
I, on the other hand, tried that once and had some computer problem where Windows freaked out and rearranged all my icons. So I never bothered grouping them again. Instead, I have Windows automatically organize them by name. If you right-click a blank area of the desktop, you can choose "Arrange Icons, By Name." So if Windows does something stupid to my icons, I can put them all back into place quickly.
Another nifty trick to find the right icon is to press the first letter of the icon name. First you need to click in a blank area of the desktop to set the focus. Then you type a letter. For example, I have a shortcut to Quark XPress, so if I press Q, the Quark XPress shortcut is highlighted. If you have more than one icon that begins with the letter, you can press it again and Windows highlights the next one in alphabetical order.
This trick works quite a bit better if you rename your icons to names that make sense to you. To change the name, right-click the shortcut icon and choose Rename. Then type your new text. For example, by default Microsoft wants all its icons for Office to say Microsoft Office, so you end up with Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and so forth. It's not only redundant, all that extra text makes your desktop shortcuts more difficult to read and to find. So I shorten my shortcut names so they makes sense to me. Since I have two versions of Word loaded on my computer, one shortcut is called Word 2000 and the other is Word 2003. Short and to the point. And if I press the letter "w," I'll go straight to them. I also have shortcuts to point to certain folders. To keep the folders all together alphabetically, I prefaced the folder name with a capital Z, so for example, I have Z_Download as the label for my Download folder shortcut.
If you get tired of looking at the same icons on your desktop all the time, you can change the shortcut icon itself. Right-click a shortcut icon and click Properties. In the Shortcut tab, click Change Icon and find ones you like better.
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