My Documents shortcuts to shared documents
If you have some folders and documents in your My Documents folder, and others within the Shared
Documents folder, you’ll probably get tired of switching between the two folders to open and save
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documents. The simple solution is to add a shortcut to your My Documents folder for every folder and
icon you place in Shared Documents. For starters, open and size both folders so that you can see their
contents. You can use your choice of method, but the following steps do work just fine:
1. Open My Documents, and then click Shared Documents under Other Places in the
Explorer bar.
2. Reduce the size of the Shared Documents folder to about half the screen.
3. Open My Documents from the Start menu, desktop, or anyplace else other than from within
the Shared Documents folder.
4. Size and position the My Documents folder to about half the screen so that you can see the
contents of both My Documents and Shared Documents.
Tip To create a new folder within My Documents, open My Documents normally. Then
choose File New Folder from Explorer’s menu bar. Type a name for the folder
and press Enter. For details and other ways to create folders, see “About Folders”
in Chapter 13.
If you want to move (not copy) a folder or document from My Documents to Shared Documents, just
drag its icon from the My Documents folder into the Shared Documents folder and drop it there. After
you move an item into Shared Documents, use the secondary (right) mouse button to drag its icon back
into My Documents. When you release the mouse button, choose Create Shortcuts Here. Figure 4-3
shows an example in which I moved the folders named Common Downloads, Databases, Ed2Go XP
Course, and MBooks into Shared Documents. Then I created shortcuts to each of those within My
Documents. You can tell which icons in My Documents are shortcuts by the little shortcut arrows on
those icons.
Figure 4-3: Shortcuts to Shared Documents folders within My Documents
After you have finished the job, you’ll find it much easier to work with documents from both folders,
because you won’t need to be navigating to Shared Documents all the time. When you open My
Documents, you just have to click the folder (or file’s) shortcut icon within My Documents to open it.
Furthermore, you will find it easier to work with Shared Documents in programs’ Open and Save As
dialog boxes. Most programs automatically set these dialog boxes to open My Documents by default.
And those dialog boxes also display the shortcuts to your shared documents, as shown in Figure 4-4.
You won’t need to navigate to Shared Documents using the drop-down list in those dialog boxes
anymore. Just click the appropriate shortcut icon within the Open or Save As dialog box to get to the
shared items. Very handy!
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Figure 4-4: Shortcuts to Shared Documents are visible in many programs’ Open and Save As dialog boxes.