Common Dialog Boxes

The common dialog boxes, such as the Save As dialog box, display the places bar on the left side. These are shortcuts to common folders, which make getting around much easier. By default, you see the History, Documents, Desktop, Favorites, and My Network Places folders there. You can customize the folders that appear in the places bar by using the Common Dialogs category in Tweak UI (see Figure 5-3 on the next page).

Figure 5-3: Make network document folders easily accessible by adding them to the places bar.

First things first: Table 5-12 describes the settings that enable you to remove the Back button and history from common dialog boxes. You can also hide the places bar altogether by setting the value NoPlacesBar to 0x01. Create this value if it doesn't exist.

Table 5-12: Values in Common Dialog Boxes

Setting	Name	Type	Data
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32
Show Back button on File Open/Save dialog box	NoBackButton	REG_DWORD	0x00 | 0x01
Remember previously-used file names	NoFileMru	REG_DWORD	0x00 | 0x01
Hide places bar	NoPlacesBar	REG_DWORD	0x00 | 0x01

Customizing the places bar is a bit more complicated. First you add to HKCU\Software \Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\ the PlacesBar subkey. In PlacesBar, create the REG_DWORD values Place0, Place1, Place2, Place3, and Place4. These correspond to the five available buttons from top to bottom. The common dialog boxes will display only the buttons specified by these values; if there is a PlacesBar subkey with no values, an empty places bar will be displayed. Then set Places N to one of the settings in shown in Table 5-13. For example, to set the second button to My Music, create the REG_DWORD value Places1 in PlacesBar, and set it to 0x0D. You're not limited to the folders you see in Table 5-13, by the way. You can create the Places N value as a REG_SZ and then add the path of any folder. To restore the default places bar, remove the PlacesBar subkey and remove the NoPlacesBar value.

Table 5-13: Folders for the Places Bar

Folder	Value
Desktop	0x00
Favorites	0x06
My Documents	0x05
My Music	0x0D
My Computer	0x11
Network Neighborhood	0x12
History	0x22
My Pictures	0x27
Recent Documents	0x08