I'm pretty sure that most folks who use Microsoft Office every day have no idea that there is a nifty little time saver called My Places. Well there is and I'm going to tell you all about it.
I am an MOS certified expert in Microsoft Word and I'm not ashamed to tell you that I didn't know about the My Places feature until just recently. It's a pretty cool feature too. I am always looking for ways to save time and keystrokes and so I highly recommend the My Places Bar. It's one of my favorite shortcuts now.
Once I discovered My Places, I decided to do a bit of research on it and I found out that it first appeared in Office 2000. You will find it on the left side of File Open and File Save As dialog boxes in Office suite applications. In Office 2003, you see it in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Front Page, OneNote, Publisher, Visio, and InfoPath.
Now in Office 2000 you were not able to customize My Places, and so most people, like myself, simply chose to ignore it. As a matter of fact, I always viewed it as an annoyance.
I'm pleased to inform you that in Office 2003 you can now customize the bar so that it is actually very useful to you. Among the ways you can customize the My Places bar are adding folders, making the icons smaller, moving the icons so that the ones you most frequently use are at the top and vice versa, and removing custom folders that you have once added to the bar. The only drawback is that you cannot easily remove the built-in locations.
To add the folders of your choice in order to save yourself some time and keystrokes, follow the steps below:
- Launch Microsoft Word if it is not already open.
- Choose Open or Save As from the File menu in any of the Office applications except Outlook.
- Navigate to the folder that you want to add to the My Places bar.
- Select the folder.
- Click on the Tools menu in the dialog's toolbar.
- Click on the Add to "My Places" menu item.
If you are unable to find the folder on the left side of My Places after you have added it, click the black arrow to reveal it's location.
After you have added a folder to the My Places bar, you can move it to the top or bottom of the list if you like. To move a folder:
- Right-click the folder and choose Move Up or Move Down.
You can do this more than once to keep moving the folder in either direction.
If, after you have added a folder you decide at a later date that you no longer want to have the folder on your My Places bar, it is very easy to remove it. Simply right-click on the folder and select Remove.
An extra added bonus is that you only have to add folders once because there is only one My Places Bar that is shared by all Office applications.
Pretty cool huh?
Carol Bratt is the Office Applications Editor at Daves Computer Tips. She has authored several informative Microsoft Office books and writes the monthly Word Bytes Newsletter with more tips and tricks in each issue. Visit Carol's website for more great Microsoft Office tips and tricks! Click here to see her latest books! You can read more about Carol here.